There is a new phenomenon in the Americas that could have a major impact in future Latin American elections: the use of the estimated $30 billion in remittances from migrant workers in the United States as a political weapon.
It's a new electoral strategy that helped El Salvador's government-backed President-elect Tony Saca win by a landslide in last weekend's elections. That strategy may soon be used by candidates in Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador and other countries that are highly dependent on funds sent by migrant workers in the United States to their relatives back home.
Throughout the Salvadoran campaign, the ruling right-of-center ARENA party claimed that if hard-line leftist candidate Shafick Handal of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) won, there would be a rift in Salvadoran-U.S. relations. That, ARENA officials claimed, would result in massive deportations of the 2.3 million Salvadorans in the United States and in a disruption in the estimated $2.2 billion a year they send home.
A typical pro-Saca television spot that aired repeatedly in the closing days of the campaign showed a middle-class Salvadoran couple receiving a phone call from their son in Los Angeles.
"Mom, I wanted to let you know that I'm scared," the young man says. "Why?" his mother asks. "Because if Shafick becomes president of El Salvador, I may be deported, and you won't be able to receive the remittances that I'm sending you," her son responds.
Salvadoran officials said in the closing weeks of the campaign that, thanks to the ruling party's good relations with the United States, the Bush administration has repeatedly renewed the Temporary Protective Status for tens of thousands of undocumented Salvadorans in the United States, and that this would end if Handal became president.
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