[News] El Salvador Left Poised for Election Victory

[Anti-Imperialist News]

El Salvador Left Poised for Election Victory: 
FMLN Party Promises a People-Centered Government

http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1740/1/
Written by Erica Thompson
Monday, 02 March 2009

Image
“An historical event is underway in El Salvador. 
For the first time, a government especially 
dedicated to the popular sectors is possible. The 
current government, subjected to the interests of 
small groups, has shown their inability to lead 
the country for the common good. A new government 
is born precisely of the hope of citizens to 
break the pattern and install a government that 
will be at the service of the entire Salvadoran 
population.” - Programa de Gobierno - Farabundo 
Martí National Liberation Front

In less than two weeks, three to four million 
people will mobilize to vote for El Salvador’s 
next president. It is widely believed that the 
results of the March 15th election will open a 
new progressive chapter in the country’s long, 
violent history of military and civil 
dictatorships. A victory for leftist Farabundo 
Martí Front for National Liberation (FMLN) party 
candidates Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sanchez 
Cerén seems eminent. Despite a dirty campaign 
against the left, rampant fraud from the right, 
and heavy police presence at the polls in 
legislative and municipal elections on January 
18th, voters catapulted the FMLN party into 
position as the first political force in the 
country, setting the stage for another win in March.

The FMLN’s path to national influence has been 
cleared with machetes and defended with 
roadblocks, organized with political caravans and 
public forums, door-to-door discussions, 
thousands of marches, inspiring speeches, and 
political struggle within the government. Its 
transition from peasant uprising to major 
political party has been made possible by unions, 
students and campesinos, vendors and families, 
teachers and nurses, mothers and migrants. Funes 
has maintained solid backing from El Salvador’s 
broad-based social movement and the party has 
found new key support as well from a sizable 
Salvadoran immigrant business community in the 
United States and from rural communities and 
small and middle-sized business sectors in El 
Salvador that are outraged with the ruling 
Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party’s 
economic policies and systematic siphoning of public resources.

ARENA has tried to divide support for the FMLN by 
portraying a criminal image of the party and 
attributing its popularity to Funes, a journalist 
who critics call a “political moderate who only 
serves for the photos.” But the FMLN’s current 
popularity is not an isolated phenomenon and 
Mauricio Funes isn’t the anomaly the right would 
like us to believe. It is true that Funes’ 
candidacy has strengthened the FMLN’s chances of 
winning. His 20 years of investigative journalism 
and popular morning news show, The Interview, 
which provided people a forum to challenge the 
government’s actions and official reporting, has 
given millions of Salvadorans a long look at 
Funes and a wide-open view into his politics. For 
this work he is widely respected. It is also true 
that the FMLN’s current popularity is very much 
in line with increasing electoral gains the party has made in past elections.

In 1994, the first year it entered elections, the 
FMLN earned 12 mayoral seats and 22 legislative 
deputies; in the presidential elections of 1994, 
1999 and 2004, the FMLN earned 32%, 29% and 37% 
of the vote respectively. The 2006 mid-term 
elections marked a turning point for the party as 
they closed an enormous gap in voter turnout and 
won the election with 943,936 votes to ARENA’s 
854,166. By that time, the FMLN was governing 
over 40% of the total population of El Salvador 
at the municipal level. Today the party has 96 
mayoral appointments­governing 60% of the 
population­and the most deputies of any party in 
the national legislative assembly, holding 35 of 84 seats.

When asked in November 2008 by Nicaraguan 
newspaper The Monocle, why he was running for 
President, Funes replied, ¨There's an historical 
opening for me to be president. The problems here 
are so powerful that I can't continue working as 
a journalist. Journalism has allowed me to know 
the realities of El Salvador - especially the 
reality of poverty. But journalism doesn't allow me to change that reality.¨

The El Salvador We Want

Financial exclusion and major news media 
blackouts have all but rejected the formal 
existence and popular support of the FMLN. Right 
wing ownership of major media has made it 
impossible for the left to fully participate in 
the established political structure. Since the 
signing of the Peace Accords in 1992 and the 
recognition of the FMLN as a political party, the 
FMLN has consistently submitted policy 
recommendations to the national assembly to 
little avail. All are reflected in the party’s 
2009 platform, which can be found in the 96 pages 
of the Programa de Gobierno (Government Program). 
They will continue to propose the implementation 
of these recommendations at the highest levels of 
government, guided by ten principles of action:

    * Overcome unemployment, the high cost of 
living, poverty, exclusion and inequality in the 
distribution of benefits and costs of development.
    * Exceed the slow growth of the economy by 
accelerating and diversifying the country’s production of resources.
    * Overcome the insecurity of the population 
and state impunity. Defeat delinquency and 
organized crime. Overcome violence and the damage 
to norms of social coexistence.
    * Overcome exclusion and inequality in the 
access to knowledge in the new society and reduce 
the gap of knowledge, science, technology, and 
information that distances our country from highly developed countries.
    * Clean the public finances – end 
incompetence and irresponsibility, in the 
handling of public money that precipitated the 
financial crisis. Overcome the lack of political 
will and reach an accord that opens a passage for 
an integral fiscal reform that El Salvador needs.
    * Confront impacts provoked by the global 
economic crisis. Agricultural insecurity, energy 
vulnerability, consequences of climate change, 
and the local effects of the recession in the United States.
    * Unify the country – dismantle the 
foundations of intolerance, polarization and a fractured economy.
    * Remove the obstacles to democracy and of 
the implementation of the Peace Accords.
    * Overcome the fragility, deterioration, and 
degradation of state institutions to construct a 
legal security for people, families, and the life of the country.
    * Overcome regional fragmentation and the 
lack of integration that has impoverished and 
disadvantaged people in this region of the world. 
Move forward toward integration that is justified 
by the interests of the people.
Evidence of the FMLN’s popularity is not hard to 
find. It can be glimpsed in massive attendance at 
rallies, the results of the first round of 
elections, and consistent electoral opinion polls 
that show they have the plan that people want and 
one that the ARENA isn’t inclined to follow: 
putting the Salvadoran government to work for the Salvadoran people.

As the right has told it, the left is making 
promises it cannot keep and its electoral 
campaign is only a smokescreen for its true 
ambition – arming and training children in the 
Salvadoran countryside to prepare to fight with 
Hugo Chavez, Hezbollah, FARC revolutionaries, and 
street gangs to overthrow the U.S Empire. This 
gem of fiction makes one wonder which ideas were 
left for scrap on the cutting room floor of 
ARENA’s campaign strategy meetings.

Perhaps more revealing of ARENA’s militaristic 
preoccupations, if less fantastic than the 
above-mentioned “armed groups” story, which has 
received incessant and unsubstantiated coverage, 
was President Saca’s address to the Salvadoran 
military on the “Day of the Soldier” in May 2007, 
in which he implored the 20-30 year old soldiers 
standing before him to rally the spirit of 
soldiers who fought in the civil war to stop the 
“waves of dangerous populism that threaten the region today.”

Who’s Afraid of Populism? Who’s Afraid of the Salvadoran People?

While in its current state of anxiety over public 
opinion polls, diminished support for its “Mano 
Dura” (Iron Fist) policies, and outright 
rejection to its formula for public resource 
privatization, ARENA could consider acquiescing 
to the people. Though it could gain some positive 
recognition for negotiating a budget for the 
public health care sector and repairing hospitals 
that were damaged in the 2001 and 2004 
earthquakes, the ARENA government will not choose such a path.

ARENA could remove its Office of Decentralization 
from the public water agency, pull back on its 
national privatization plan and sign agreements 
with the water workers union to supply resources 
for potable water projects and new delivery 
systems, but then it would be undoing the steps 
it has already committed to. It could gain voter 
confidence by canceling its mining contracts with 
Pacific Rim Corporation and the scores of other 
exploitative projects it has begun across the 
northern half of El Salvador, but that is not the 
ARENA party. To this party, crises among the 
public sector are signs of progress and the 
direct consequences of the ARENA plan.

Instead, ARENA has shown contempt for voters 
while putting its foreign investor friends on 
notice of what looks to them to be an impending 
disaster­a functioning democracy. While asking 
for tougher electoral intervention from the U.S. 
government, the party has spent nearly $10 
million on a campaign of fear and distortion, 
requested over $1.5 billion in international 
loans, and worked to secure foreign construction 
contracts worth billions more before President 
Saca’s term expires in June. What’s the rush? Is 
the ARENA party preparing to lose? The likely 
answer is that it is covering its investments, 
just in case. ARENA party leaders who have been 
selling El Salvador piecemeal to multinational 
corporations for years are working quickly now to 
consolidate development contracts before June, 
when an FMLN government could take office. One 
such project is the Port of La Union, a several 
billion-dollar transnational trade hub that ARENA 
believes should be 90% privately owned.

An FMLN victory would immediately open up the 
government’s accounting books, exposing ARENA’s 
myriad abuses to national and foreign aid budgets 
and, in turn, the people, land and resources of 
El Salvador. For example, the FMLN has repeatedly 
cited the existence of over $600 million dollars 
in “missing taxes” that corporations and 
individuals should be paying into the national 
budget each year and have denounced the fact that 
85% of El Salvador’s land and commercial sectors 
are owned by a five-family oligarchy.

Despite its worried disposition and reluctance to 
engage honestly with the Salvadoran electorate, 
no, ARENA is not preparing to lose the 
presidential election. In fact, it is pulling out 
all of the stops to buy the election, if 
possible. In perhaps its strangest act of irony, 
the party is blasting email advertisements 
throughout the U.S. that offers discounted 
airfare rates to Salvadorans who are willing to 
return home to vote for ARENA candidate Rodrigo 
Avila. The cost is $330 and almost certainly 
guarantees a ride from and back to the airport 
and a full-time escort, who will ensure that 
visitors find their way to the voting box and 
then promptly return to work
in the U.S.

Interestingly, while mainstream media has worked 
to stunt and vilify the FMLN’s aspirations for 
government, Funes’ candidacy has been maintained 
as a positive and prolific campaign. While the 
FMLN has had to pay exorbitant rates for costly 
and minimal ad space in daily newspapers and on 
prime time television, the Internet contains 
dozens of interviews, monologues, campaign 
speeches, and ads surrounding Funes and the FMLN 
campaign. One of the most inventive media pieces 
of the campaign are Microprogramas–short, smart 
and stylish tutorial programs that explore 
various aspects of El Salvador’s government and 
economy and outline the FMLN’s platform on such 
issues. Each program lasts 5-10 minutes and the 
FMLN has made 45 of them. The Microprogramas are 
windows into how the FMLN has led public 
education campaigns in strengthening people’s 
understanding and approach toward the government’s role in Salvadoran society.

If the FMLN has its way, El Salvador will join 
the growing movement for participatory democracy 
across Latin American in its own unique way, as 
prescribed by the people who brought them to 
power. Funes has promised a transparent budget 
prioritization process and a functional Attorney 
General’s Office, as well as strengthening rights 
to basic necessities such as food, education, 
housing, health care, and civil liberties while 
enhancing El Salvador’s role in the local and 
regional economy over the next five years. 
Because its adversaries come from outside of the 
interests of the people of El Salvador, the 
FMLN’s ability to make these modest goals a 
reality begins and ends with its base of support and the poor majority.

“The people’s resistance in El Salvador walks on 
two feet; one foot is the social movement and the 
other is the FMLN." said Estella Ramirez, a 
factory worker turned union organizer. "The work 
of the government is to create the legal and 
financial framework for all people and sectors of 
society to be able to access the government. This 
way the majority of Salvadorans can determine the 
course of our country’s future.”




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