The last day
Tuesday, March 17 was the day Soffiyah & I were scheduled to fly back to the US. Since our flight wasn't until 4:40pm, we had a bit of time to look around. Along with our Swedish hotel-mate and author, Monica Zak, we decided to check out the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen (Museum of the Word and Image, abbreviated in Spanish as "MUPI"). If I remember correctly, the museum was founded by the same Venezuelan, a man known as "Santiago", who founded the rebels' underground radio station, Radio Venceremos. About half the museum was dedicated to a permanent exhibit featuring relics from the civil war: photos of guerillas and peasants in the "liberated zone", a short film about Radio Venceremos, a recreation of a jungle radio station, etc. The rest of the museum displayed an exhibit celebrating the centenary of the birth of revolutionary Salvadoran poet Pedro Geoffroy Rivas.
Monica and Soffiyah in front of the Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen



Later on, on my own, I visited another lovely museum just a few blocks from our hotel, the Museo de la Arte Popular (Folk Art Museum). About half of this museum centered around the work of a woman from the town of Ilobasco in the state of Cabanas named Dominga Herrera. Starting in the 1940s, she created clay figurines and dioramas portraying scenes from everyday life, which have now become a major cottage industry in the town.
"Sopresas" (surprises) from Ilobasco, here depicting the "Proceso de Maiz" - various stages in the usage of corn



"Proceso de la Vida - The Process of Life



"Proceso del Amor" - nuf said



A sacred festival



Fruits



More fruits



True-to-scale replica of the central square in Ilobasco



Dominga Herrera appeared in the November 1944 edition of National Geographic



The rest of this tiny museum was devoted to colorful examples of folk art from around the country.
El Desayuno (Breakfast)



Early public transportation



Green (zero-carbon emission) turn signals



Acrobat. I took this one mainly because it was made in Jucuapa, home of my good friend Lilliam.



"Distribution of land reform titles"



"The law". In El Salvador the law is definitely a woman - a poor woman who can't afford much in the way of clothes.



Sculpture (bird on sheep?) made from a single piece of wood



Typical woven belts

The Day After
Monday, March 16, the day after the elections was my friends Federico and Marina's last day in El Salvador. We decided to take a quick trip the National University before they had to leave to catch their flight. We took a short walk from our hotel and ended up at an entrance on the west side of the campus. We started to walk in through a vehicle gate, but the security guard called us over to where he was checking the IDs of everyone walking in. Federico completely wowed him with a line beginning "Nosotros somos obviamente extranjeros..." ("We're obviously foreigners...") In this case it was enough to get us in.

Once we got inside, it became clear that the security guard who let us in had not been reading the grafitti painted on the walls, which ran from hammers and sickles to Latin-socialist heros to contemporary Central American artists and writers. Perhaps they would not have counselled friendship with "obvious foreigners", particularly those coming from the north! Federico explained that, in the tradition of Latin American public univerisities, the Universidad Nacional was considered autonoma, which explained the left-wing iconography.
This portrait of Che appears to the right of the stage in the main auditorium.



Slightly blurry (mea culpa) portrait for Archbishop Romero in the main hall of the auditorium building



A soccer game at the university in the shadow of the San Salvador volcano

Election Day
Early morning view from the back of the school in El Carmen, Cuzcatlan, where our observerer group was assigned to monitor voting


Voting begins. Each table had 2 observers (main & alternate) from each party.


Voters consult lists of names and photos - many seemed illiterate - to see at which table to vote


The school's front courtyard around 8:20, before the morning rush


Things really began to pick up around 10am.


Your humble reporter takes a break to have his picture made in front of two of the provinces several volcanos.


The taker of the previous photo, Porfirio Palacios, and two of his children. He said they walked for two hours to get to the polls.


View to the west from behind the school.


Voting continues into the afternoon.


Around 4:00, an hour before polls closed, I took brief walk through the town of El Carmen.


The church.


In El Carmen. The bus is one of many vehicles used by ARENA supporters to bring voters to the polls. I only saw one FMLN vehicle.


The school courtyard 15 minutes or so before the polls closed.


At 2 or 3 minutes past 5:00 the front gate of the school clanged shut, and the counting of votes began.



The President of the table examines each ballot...



and holds it up for all to see.



Once the counting of uncontested ballots is complete, the crew assigned to each table, including the observers from each party, review contested ballots in an attempt to achieve concensus. If they cannot agree, they call in the president of the municipal election council, which oversees the whole process. I don't pretend to have become an expert in the intricacies of the election law. I did find this reconciliation process fascinating. The following two ballots, both claimed by ARENA and contested by FMLN, are ones for which the council president had to be called in.


This ballot was annulled because, though to me the voter's intention seems clear, the mark did not touch the "flag".


This ballot, whose completer's intention seems much less clear than in the previous case, counted as a vote for ARENA, since the mark touched the flag.


On the way back to San Salvador we stopped at a gas station. I was fascinated by these motorized bicycles.


By the time we got back to FMLN HQ in the capital the outcome had become clear, and celebrations were in full swing.

Just a quickie tonight, since tomorrow is the big day, and I've got to be up early. Today we finally put the finishing touches on our process of becoming observers when we were issued our official International Observer uniforms.
A crack team of observers, ready to go to work stamping out fraud. From left to right: Vanessa, Michael, Federico and Soffiyah

After that our good FMLN friend Nelson, over the objections of others, packed 11 of us into a minivan and took us off to the Pacific Ocean beach at La Libertad, where some of us swam and we all lunched on seafood. Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures, which may be just as well. You'll have to use your imagination.

Well, yesterday turned out to be another quite an eventful day. My blogging yesterday morning almost made me miss my ride to the Supreme Electoral Commission HQ - in the Radisson Hotel in the trendy Escalon district of San Salvador - to (finally!) pick up my observer credential. In the rush to get on the bus I forgot my passport. At the Radisson the credentialling lady gave me a dirty look but finally agreed to give me a credential based on my NY driver's license. This I'm sure will come back to haunt me, since the death squads will almost certainly be going around looking to rub out (pushy) NY drivers. (Note to those who are behind on your Central American history: this is a JOKE; death squads THANKFULLY seem pretty much to be a thing of the past in El Salvador.) Unfortunately two of our compas (who HAD passports) could not find their names on the list, so the rest of us had to cool our heels for a while on the hotel's snazzy, sunny terrace while our handlers tried - ultimately successfully - to straighten the matter out.

















After a short and very pleasant time sitting in the sun I was chosen (maybe because of my name?) for a 5-person delegation sent to San Miguel, El Salvador's second largest city and the hub of the eastern end of the country, known, oddly, as "Oriente". I at first felt a bit guilty, because I had already been to San Miguel on my previous trip to El Salvador in 2004, and I'm sure many of my fellow observers had not, but guilt soon gave way to pain as my delicate gringo tuchus was jolted unceremoniously along the roads of this great nation in the back of a tiny, Chinese-made mini-van. Actually, it wasn't all that bad, although one distinctly gets the sense - once again - that we gringos are really lucky when it comes to motorized transportation! We continued driving, across at least 1/2 of the country, the temperature steadily rising as we came down off the central plateau and onto the eastern plain, for several hours. Still, in a country the size of Massachusetts even a drive crossing half the territory cannot last forever. We pulled into San Miguel just around two and, as it turned out, just in time for lunch. An extended family of FMLN activistas who live part-time in NY had us over for a sumptuous lunch of roast chicken, rice pliaf, salad, home-made tortillas and cheese with coffee and stewed mangos for desert. There obviously are benefits to being picked as a people's delegate! and I hereby resolve never again to think twice when given chance to stuff myself in the name of the proletariat!
Group photo (taken by an obviously inferior (Chinese?) camera!) of three of our lunch hosts, our driver and three of our observer party



Lunch completed, we still had to complete the "official" part of our mission. We followed one of our hosts, a man named "Turcios", to the local FMLN HQ, where we met for about an hour with the man responsible for the party's election effort in San Miguel, Nelson Quintanilla, as well as with several lesser dignitaries, who explained to us the various vagaries of the local election effort with particular attention to the types of fraud that they expected to have to confront. These include: voting by dead people and by expatriate citizens who somehow manage to vote in El Salvador at the same time that they continue to show up at work (or at least at the day laborer's corner) in N. America, the outright buying of votes through various elaborate schemes, and voting by scores, if not hundreds or even thousands of Central Americans from neighboring countries. All of these fruads, according to Nelson, are part of the reason that the presence of International Observers is so important in this election. I don't know whether or not this comment falls into the category of propaganda, but in any case it worked: my head swelled right up!

By the time we left the (air-conditioned!) FMLN HQ in San Miguel the temperature had cooled off considerably, and our ride back to San Salvador was considerably more pleasant than the outbound leg. We also passed some spectacular scenery as we drove into the setting sun. Several of us tried to capture a piece of it as we zipped along.

View back towards the east over the valley of the Rio Lempa, El Salvador's major river, which, flowing north to south, cuts the country approximately in half.



Did I mention that Mr. Quintanilla issued us all FMLN artistic licenses valid anywhere in the country?



Nadia Marin, one of my fellow Observers, snaps a shot.







Tonantzin, the Aztec sun goddess, ducks modestly behind the ample chest of her mother, the twin-peaked volcano Chinchontepeque, the "twin-breasted mountain". (I'm not making this stuff up!)



Our FMLN escort, a very nice chap named Daniel Navas, and one of the very small minority of pure Native Americans in El Salvador, makes it clear with his finger (and ambiguous with his smile) that he doesn't want his photo taken.



Pickup truck carrying bodies of individuals assisinated by right-wing death squads. (Please see note above about death squads.)



Chinchontepeque just before her daughter Tonantzin's bed time



In case anyone doubted the "twin-breasted" part please have a look at this photo (snapped discreetly through a veil of trees to preserve the family-friendly nature of this blog)