Criminy, he led the guerrilla army that ousted the terrible Batistas in Nicaragua.
So that's FOUR presidents elected in Latin America with backgrounds as leftist guerrillas, if Ceren is elected in El Salvador. Currently, the number is THREE.
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If elected, Sanchez Ceren would be Latin America's third ex-guerrilla president, following in the footsteps of Brazil's Dilma Rousseff and Uruguay's Jose Mujica. from the OP
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Then there is Michele Bachelet, just elected president of Chile. She wasn't a guerrilla fighter but
was persecuted by the U.S.-supported fascist regime, and lost her father to their torture.
It's getting to be an extraordinary positive for Latin American leaders to have opposed the U.S. government's fascist allies!
I should say, too--and here's the lesson for us--that Latin Americans in many countries have ALSO done their civic duty as to creating honest, transparent election systems, and as to strong, well-organized, grass roots activism. These are two major factors in the elections of all of these leftists--across South America (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, Uruguay) and into Central America (Nicaragua, and now good prospects in Costa Rica and El Salvador).
Both things are terribly lacking here. Our election system is egregiously non-transparent--run largely by one, private, far rightwing-connected corporation--ES&S, which bought out Diebold--using 'TRADE SECRET' programming code, throughout the U.S., with virtually no auditing (comparison of ballots to machine totals). This horrible system has been turning out congresses with single digit approval ratings, among other atrocities! Time to get rid of it! And while our people are far more active in grass roots organization than the corporate media ever gives them credit for, we have DEAF LEADERS in our own party, many of them s/elected by ES&S to be just that--deaf!--and the national political dialogue just keeps lurching further and further to the right, fueled also by billions of dollars in dirty money. Our people can't get any traction, because so much has been done, so systematically, and in such subtle and clever ways, to demoralize and disenfranchise us.
We will, though, restore democracy in time. Certain ideas never die, can't be killed; they are too appealing to human beings--ideas such as democracy, honest vote counting, fairness, equal opportunity, cooperation, protection of "the Commons," common provision for the elderly, the sick and the young, peace, opposition to unjust war, opposition to militarism and a police state. And our country is, after all, the birthplace of modern democracy. These traditions are very, very strong here, despite everything. We WILL restore democracy here, but it's going to take some work, for sure.
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