Video link to paper ballot, public vote counting in El Salvador right now:

[EFerrari]

http://www.megavision.com.sv/21/internettv/canal21.html

The right wing vampires look to lose this one after decades of US - backed criminal control. Results in later tonight. And knowing the oligarchy in El Salvador, I'll celebrate when the results are announced.

[Gregorian]

1. Good news.

Fascists be gone.

[EFerrari]

3. These are the same people Rayguns went to war with.

I hope he's spinning right now, the bastard.

[Kurovski]

2. K&R.

the site wants me to flash!!

Or something.

It's tough out there for right-wing vampires. Just not quite as tough as I'd like. But here's hoping. :toast:

[EFerrari]

5. It wants you to download some Microsoft deal. I did

doesn't take long but then, I have no idea if it will eat my face in the middle of the night. lol

This may turn out to be a great day, Kurovski. :cry:

[Kurovski]

7. You are the sweetie-pie of the world.

:-) :hug:

Just one more rec to hit 5. Who will be lucky number 5?

[Peace Patriot]

9. Me! Me! I did it! 5!

Whopping big voter turnout--70%! Very early returns put Funes ahead, but nothing solid until 7:30 PM El Salvador time, when they're going to provide prelim returns based on 45% of the vote.

Elizabeth, what's the time difference with California?

-------

Two good election sites...

http://latinamericanmusings.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-el-salvador-election-news-feed/

http://cispes.org/09electionsblog/
(But they've got a long Spanish post up there right now, about ARENA bringing in foreigners to vote. It'll take me some time to read it. (I'm not fluent.)

Here's part of it:

Police and media people had left and right when we thought the party was over, a bright shiny SUV with flags that said “Yo No Entrego a El Salvador” (an ARENA front group) passed by the headquarters with two more huge trucks full of 70 to 80 thin mattresses in the back.

Eventually they passed around the corner at a creeping pace. Again we thought the show was over and returned around the block to where we had parked, only to see both trucks again, waiting at the corner, presumably for command from their bosses. We spoke a little more with the police and decided before leaving to check the headquarters once more. We arrived in time to find the trucks mostly empty, and about 15 ARENA activists, sweating from panic and hardwork, hurrying the mattresses into the headquarters. The police didn’t do anything, but only later explained that people pass by with mattresses all the time.
Reports have also been made in other municipalities of hundreds of foreigners being housed in preparation for the vote.

NOTE: This is a report from two international election observers, about trucks carrying lots of mattresses and Nicaraguans to ARENA headquarters in San Salvador--supposedly to vote. They'd had a report of truckloads of Nicaraguans and went to investigate. They saw the mattresses being unloaded, but not the Nicaraguans. They tried to get the police to investigate, but they wouldn't. At least the election observers are doing their job--very well, it seems.

[EFerrari]

10. They're an hour ahead of us in our state.

(Need a chewing fingernail smilie right here.)

:hug:

[Peace Patriot]

14. Thanks! Pins and needles, eh? I just read a Wall Street Urinal report at

http://latinamericanmusings.wordpress.com/2009/03/15/the-el-salvador-election-news-feed/

...which explains about the alphabetical polling stations. Geez, try to make it hard for the poor to vote! They have to drive all over San Salvador to find their voting place. That's crazy.

Here's the Urinal:

"Under election rules here, voters do not cast their ballots where they live, but rather must go to polling sites arranged alphabetically within their city’s limits. The country’s single biggest voting district is the capital, San Salvador, which has almost 300,000 voters, many of whom had to travel miles across the sprawling city to reach their designated spot.

The FMLN complains that such a system favors the rich whose private vehicles give them easier access to the polls. The counter-argument is that in a country where many people live in shanty settlements without fixed addresses, voting by name at a pre-determined site reduces the temptation to commit fraud."

Fucking rich Urinators with their gold-plated pisspots are right there with the "kill the poor" argument, just in case it's needed. Would ARENA thugs charge shantytown residents a poll tax bus ride to vote against them? Surely not. We don't do that in civilized countries. We have good reasons for keeping poor people from voting--they might cheat.

[EFerrari]

15. And then they MOVED the polling stations as I heard on one report

from their local Channel 21.

Nothing any of us here in this forum wouldn't recognize.

[Kurovski]

11. I already knew this, but...

you are magnificent! :-) :thumbsup:

[EFerrari]

13. Peace Patriot is a shining light on this board.

:thumbsup:

[Idealism]

4. It isn't over till its over, E!

I recall 2000, being that I live in Palm Beach among other things, and I will hold my breath until the results are announced.

Lets go FMNL!

[EFerrari]

6. I know. I'm crying pre-emptively, though.

lol

Andale!

[bleever]

8. Make it so!

How incredible will that be?

[EFerrari]

12. Those people have been through everything.

Free Elections are Dangerous

So, I’ve been researching a massacre in El Salvador in 1932 that my grandfather was intimately involved in. I found out about it by googling his name one very bored night. And, it all went back to an election. I’m not sure what I make of it all yet but, here goes.

When El Salvador became an independent entity, there was a great deal of civil unrest until they started staging elections. Things calmed down after that.

Then, in 1931, the incumbent – who was something of a philosopher and somewhat off of the reservation decided to hold a real election. He didn’t choose a successor. The coffee barons and the bankers and the military were horrified but, they mostly watched to see how things would turn out.

The people elected, as far as I can tell, their choice AND he was seated. A moderate who had the misfortune to have the coffee market collapse on his watch.



http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x422139

(I repost that link because the people have been threatened with horrible violence if they vote in the FMLN left. The right wing has deliberately invoked the slaughter of the genocide of 1932 to try to suppress the vote. That's how desperate these mofos are. :hug: )

[Stevepol]

16. Hope they're using paper!

[Peace Patriot]

17. Yes, they are--and they count at the precinct level, then they send the "digitized"

results electronically to the election commission. Not quite sure what that entails. But it is worrisome, since that was probably how Mexico's presidential election was stolen in 2005. The leftist lost by only 0.05% in a midnight electronic tabulation, of votes that had been cast on paper ballots. Millions of leftists protested, and shut down Mexico City, but they had to give it up, finally, cuz the EU election monitors signed off on the election.

The Bushwhacks wanted the rightwing candidate, who 'won,' to privatize Mexico's Constitutionally protected oil resource, which he soon started trying to do, but has failed at--it is a very unpopular idea in Mexico. Bushwhack "war on drugs" billions to Mexico last summer, and the drug gang war they stirred up, might be related to this--giving the rightwing president weapons and a militarized police force with which to suppress protests if he privatizes the oil by stealth or by fiat.

The motives for doing the same in El Salvador, if they can (the leftist seems way ahead at this point, so it might not be possible without re-starting the old civil war) would be to stem the leftist tide that has swept over South America, and is lapping at our shores (Nicaragua elected a leftist as prez; Honduras is leaning left; Guatemala just elected their first progressive government, ever, which is sympathetic to the social justice goals of the Bolivarians in South America; and Mexico could go left in the next election.) This is a very threatening tide to our corpo/fascists, besides denying them easy access for theft of Latin American resources and World Bank/"free trade" type exploitation. We might get ideas here about democracy and leftist economic policy.

[EFerrari]

18. In the video, you can see them opening paper ballots and calling out

the vote. :)

[EFerrari]

19. The FMLN candidate is giving his victory speech right now.

El pueblo unido! The people together won today. Free elections have conseqauences.

ETA: That would be, President Funes.

I can't tell you how impossible this journey was for the FMLN and how much I respect them for putting their heads down and working, these long 25 years.

:cry:

:grouphug:

[bleever]

26. Let freedom ring

and resonate in every home and every heart.

:hug:

:grouphug:

[Kurovski]

20. Congratulations on the victory.

May true Democracy reach every corner of the earth.

[EFerrari]

21. Jackson is the American godfather of this victory.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSiv9HOVrhw

:hi:

:woohoo:

[Wilms]

22. Too Many Angels

It gets going @2:30 min in.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0OMowqYUVyw&fmt=18

:cry:

[EFerrari]

24. Jackson still looks about 25 ro me and he always will I guess.

[L. Coyote]

23. ARENA, party of the death squads, has been defeated. VIVA la Liberacion!

An estimated 2.5 million Salvadoran immigrants live in the US. The money they send every month to the seven million people living back home buffers the economy - comprising nearly one-fifth of GDP.

Many of those immigrants fled during the 1980s, when war wracked the city and the countryside. It was then too that the US solidified its dominance in Salvadoran affairs. The United States backed the government with weapons, hardware and millions of dollars in financing. Little El Salvador had become a key Cold war battleground in the Americas.

A national hero

The Arena party was also born, founded by an army major named Roberto D'Aubuisson who directed paramilitary death squads. The party won the presidency in 1989 and has not lost it since. Party faithful to this day revere D'Aubuisson as a national hero.

..... http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2009/03/2009314124242413618.html

[EFerrari]

25. Did you see that two House Republicans took to the floor last week

and threatened to cut off the remittances if El Salvador elected the progressive?

Lovely people, Republicans.

We OUTLASTED the bastards, L.!

:woohoo: