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<font size=3>El Salvador Left Poised for Election Victory: FMLN Party
Promises a People-Centered Government<br><br>
<a href="http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1740/1/" eudora="autourl">
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1740/1/<br>
</a>Written by Erica Thompson <br>
Monday, 02 March 2009 <br><br>
<img src="http://upsidedownworld.org/main/images/stories/Feb09/farabundo_marti.jpg" width=187 height=171 alt="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 <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.¨ <br><br>
The El Salvador We Want <br><br>
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: <br><br>
<ol>
<li>Overcome unemployment, the high cost of living, poverty, exclusion
and inequality in the distribution of benefits and costs of development.
<li>Exceed the slow growth of the economy by accelerating and
diversifying the country’s production of resources.
<li>Overcome the insecurity of the population and state impunity. Defeat
delinquency and organized crime. Overcome violence and the damage to
norms of social coexistence.
<li>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.
<li>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.
<li>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.
<li>Unify the country – dismantle the foundations of intolerance,
polarization and a fractured economy.
<li>Remove the obstacles to democracy and of the implementation of the
Peace Accords.
<li>Overcome the fragility, deterioration, and degradation of state
institutions to construct a legal security for people, families, and the
life of the country.
<li>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.
</ol>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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.”
<br><br>
Who’s Afraid of Populism? Who’s Afraid of the Salvadoran People?
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
“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.”<br><br>
<br><br>
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