[News] Salvadoran Election Climate
Anti-Imperialist News
news at freedomarchives.org
Thu Mar 12 12:32:18 EDT 2009
Salvadoran Election Climate: Evidence that
Washingtons Policies Have Been Buried on Wall Street?
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1760/1/
Written by Jesse Stewart and Meredith Defrancesco
Thursday, 12 March 2009
The dusty roads outside the town of Suchitoto in
El Salvador are marked by omnipresent reminders
of the coming elections: political propaganda
painted on rocks and telephone polls, and
homemade flags hanging from trees. Yet in a
'back to the future twist,' scattered throughout
these small quiet towns are deployments of
Salvadoran troops who have been patrolling the
region over the last several months. AK-47
touting soldiers have become commonplace, says
Pedro Miranda Rivera, president of the community
association PROGRESO, ever since the Salvadoran
Government accused these communities of harboring
illegal armed groups the government implies are
linked to the political opposition. This
concerns us in Suchitoto, says Miranda Rivera,
because since these accusations were made, there
has been constant military movement in the
regionthey are doing this to create fear in the
population. To date, the Salvadoran Government
and Attorney General have produced no credible
evidence to confirm the existence of these armed
groups, and chief European Union elections
observer Luis Yáñez Barnuevo has called the
accusations a typical electoral ruse in
interviews with major Salvadoran electronic media
<http://www.elecciones2009.elfaro.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=100:luis-yanez-barnuevo-eso-de-los-grupos-armados-era-la-tipica-argucia-electoral&catid=10:elecciones-2009&Itemid=2>El
Faro. Nevertheless, the troops remain on patrol,
a dark reminder of El Salvadors past.
The Reagan era and the Cold War may be over for
many, but this week in El Salvador an important
legacy of that war still fights for hearts and
minds. Salvadorans go to the polls on Sunday to
pick their next president, and the same major
military forces that fought Reagans proxy war
twenty years ago are still contenders. The
flashpoint in this ongoing struggle over El
Salvadors future continues to be disparities and
polarization enabled in large part by US
intervention and prescribed economic
policies. Now, the former guerrilla and current
opposition FMLN party is leading most polls over
the right wing government ARENA partythe same
party that fought the FMLN with US training and
funding to the tune of a million dollars per day,
and which has ruled the country ever since. But
beyond the symbolism and outdated rhetoric still
used by some, this election appears to be about entirely different forces.
The Salvadoran people are suffering at from the
waves of the international economic crisis, which
is exacerbating an already volatile social
situation. Recent opinion polls by the
<http://www.uca.edu.sv/publica/iudop/Web/2008/informe117.pdf>University
of Central America in San Salvador confirm that
the overwhelming majority of the population is
primarily concerned with the economy, poverty,
unemployment and crime during this election
cycle. The economic policies applied by four
consecutive ARENA governments have favored a
small group of the economically powerful that
control the ARENA party. But this has had an
adverse affect on the great majorities of our
country, says Pedro Juan Hernandez, a Salvadoran
economist and the leader of the MPR-12 social
movement, a coalition of grassroots civil-society
organizations including unions, war veterans, and
rural farmers. As a result, the country has
experienced massive migration, and almost one
third of the population now lives in the
US. According to experts at the Salvadoran
organization
<http://www.equipomaiz.org.sv/>Equipo Maiz, most
of this exodus has occurred after the end of
civil war in 1992, creating a flood of economic
refugees, victims of neoliberal economic policies
that were specially packaged for El Salvador by
Washington under the guise of IMF and World Bank assistance.
These policies have given rise to El Salvadors
strongest export--its millions of poor young
people who have offered themselves up to US
markets as cheap laborers, even while they
improve the countries poverty indexes by
conveniently disappearing. Indeed, in large part
the policies that have expelled the countries
poorest have contributed to vaulting El Salvador
to its ranking by the
<http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/DATASTATISTICS/0,,contentMDK:20421402%7EpagePK:64133150%7EpiPK:64133175%7EtheSitePK:239419,00.html#Lower_middle_income>World
Bank as a lower middle-income country, based on
mean income calculations from GDP. Mary OGrady
of the
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123534864060444641.html?mod=rss_opinion_main>Wall
Street Journal lauds it as one of the most open
and competitive economies in Latin America. Yet
these accolades are deceptive and not indicators
of wealth distribution and employment
opportunities. In fact, with only 50 percent of
the Salvadoran population reporting jobs in the
formal sector, according to a 2008
<http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/nationalreports/latinamericathecaribbean/elsalvador/name,3411,en.html>UN
Development Program report, Salvadorans that
dont migrate or live on remittances are most
often left selling whatever they can in the streets to feed their families.
Meanwhile, the
<http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1109.html>US
State Department reports Salvadoran homicide
rates as amongst the highest per capita in the
world. Generations of children that grew up in
the midst of war, in turn abandon their children
in search of work in the north, and imported L.A.
gang culture replaces them as surrogate
families. El Salvador is infamous for its
violent gangs whose origins can be traced to
major US cities home to Salvadoran
immigrants. Yet with the current crisis in the
US, remittances to El Salvador fell by 8.4
percent in the first month of this year compared
with January of last year, according to data
published by the
<http://www.bcr.gob.sv/?x21=46>Salvadoran Central
Reserve Bank. As El Salvadors largest GDP
contributor at nearly 20 percent, remittances
effectively ended what had been steady growth
rates in August of 2008, and rates have not
marked monthly growth since September. Given
this scenario, you might wonder how any incumbent could dream of reelection.
But that is where Reagans legacy becomes
important. El Salvador's ARENA party has held
presidential power for the past 20 years, in part
by relying on close alliances with US military
and business interests. Continuing with that
legacy, El Salvador has kept troops in Iraq,
served as a base for US police and anti-narcotics
training schools unpopular elsewhere in Central
America, and has executed US economic policy by
the book, even dollarizing the economy. These
policies have been widely unpopular amongst the
majority of the population in polls taken by the
<http://www.elfaro.net/secciones/noticias/20050221/noticias5_20050221.asp>Technological
University of El Salvador. Despite this, ARENA
has stuck to its anti-communist guns, and their
party anthem still professes that El Salvador
will be the tomb where the reds will die.
But equating the FMLN to radical communism isnt
as easy as it once was, despite the best efforts
of the right. The
<http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0106_central_america_lowenthal.aspx>Brookings
Institute characterizes current FMLN candidate
Mauricio Funes, who is a former CNN reporter, as
more in the mold of Michelle Bachelet of Chile,
or Lula da Silva of Brazil, than Hugo Chavez.
While they cant deny Funes as a moderate,
conservative North American analysts and
columnists for the Brookings Institute,
<http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,508864,00.html>Fox
News, and the
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123534864060444641.html?mod=rss_opinion_main>Wall
Street Journal all prefer to focus on the extent
of influence that hardliner elements within the
FMLN party might have if Funes were elected, the
same strategy used by ARENA and El Salvadors
right wing media. Meanwhile, US influence is not
yet a thing of the past. On Tuesday El
Salvadors largest circulating daily, the
<http://www.elsalvador.com/mwedh/nota/nota_completa.asp?idCat=6351&idArt=3426239>Diario
de Hoy, published news of a letter signed by over
40 Republicans in Congress, denouncing the FMLN
and warning of their links to Venezuela and
Cuba. The letter expresses grave concern that a
victory by the FMLN could make links between El
Salvador and the regimes of Venezuela, Iran and
Cuba, and other states that promote terrorism,
and also with other non-democratic regimes and terrorist organizations.
In fact, it was El Salvadors US-styled
anti-terrorism law that sparked national protest
and international outcry nearly two years ago
when 13 activists protesting water privatization
in the colonial town of Suchitoto were charged
with terrorism. All charges were later dropped,
but ill treatment by police and abuse of
authority, as documented by
<http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e&id=ENGUSA20070718001>Amnesty
International, can be linked back to the current
ARENA presidential candidate, and then chief of
Salvadoran Police, Rodrigo Avila. The
US-educated Avila is hoping to become the latest
heir to the ARENA presidency, yet his candidacy
raises concern for leaders in Suchitoto such as
Miranda, who say the population hasnt forgotten
what Avila did. Rodrigo Avila is the person
that authorized the operation the police carried
out in Suchitoto. He authorized that they fire
tear gas, he authorized the abuse of force, the
torture of the people captured, when they
threatened them that they would be thrown from
the helicopter. The abuses Miranda describes
have been documented extensively by the
Salvadoran Government
<http://www.pddh.gob.sv/docs/InformepreliminarSuchitoto23julio07.pdf>Human
Rights Ombudsmen, and these sorts of practices
hark back to dirty war practices throughout the
region, when dissidents were tortured and killed
by ARENA and their predecessors under US guidance
and cooperation in the name of fighting communists and terrorists.
This polarization persists. The recent media
attention garnered by the Congressional letter is
only the latest in a coordinated campaign, which
has united hard-line conservatives from El
Salvador, <http://fuerzasolidaria.org/>Venezuela,
and the United States with the aim of undermining
the FMLN. Pedro Juan Hernandez says this has
been a consistent trend: ARENA has tried to
continue to use scare tactics, for example that
[if the FMLN wins] remittances from Salvadorans
will be reduced, or that there will even be
deportations of Salvadorans. There has been a
strong smear campaign by ARENA in the latest
weeks, trying to discredit the FMLN, to fiercely
attack the FMLN candidates, trying to scare the
population about the possibility of the FMLN gaining power.
Despite this alliance to maintain the status
quo, Hernandez reports that an estimated 250,000
people participated in a San Salvador rally on
Saturday in an impressive show of force for a
country whose population is only 5.7 million,
according to the
<http://www.censos.gob.sv/>latest
census. Hernandez believes these unprecedented
numbers speak to the popular rejection of years
of failed policies that were often US
hand-me-downs. The economic policies that were
born in Washington, have been buried on Wall
Street, he says, referring to the financial
meltdown. While he is careful to caution that
this is by no means the end of capitalism, he
sees the inevitability of reformulating policy
models, including more government regulation of
the financial sector. Hernandez articulates the
need for new policies where diplomacy and
respect of sovereignty prevail in relations, and
says I hope that this happens for the good of
the countries of Latin America, as well as the
benefit of the people of the United States.
While unequivocal in their calls for change, both
Hernandez and Miranda are quick to condition
their support of the FMLN. Indeed, the
Salvadoran social movement they represent has
long functioned independently, and been outspoken
in advocating solutions that dont tow any party
line. Their principle platform has been the
fight against poverty, reactivation of the
agricultural sector for food security, the
struggle against the privatization of water and
mining exploitation, and a call for improved
salaries as well as freedom of association for
unions. In laying out the demands of the broad
sectors of society that his organization, the
MPR-12, represents, Hernandez is cautious about
an FMLN victory on Sunday, and qualifies his
support by saying this is in no way a blank
check. He points out that the election is not a
quick fix, and that it will be the Salvadoran
people and social organizations that will
continue to shoulder the burden of pushing their
leaders toward much-needed policy reforms.
Jesse Stewart and Meredith Defrancesco are
journalists with <http://www.weru.org/>WERU
Community Radio in Maine, and have spent
extensive time in El Salvador. WERU is a member
of <http://www.elsalvadorsolidarity.org/>US-El
Salvador Sister Cities, a grassroots solidarity
network partnering US cities with Salvadoran rural communities.
Freedom Archives
522 Valencia Street
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415 863-9977
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