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<font size=3>Salvadoran Election Climate: Evidence that “Washington’s
Policies Have Been Buried on Wall Street?” <br><br>
<a href="http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1760/1/" eudora="autourl">
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1760/1/<br>
</a>Written by Jesse Stewart and Meredith Defrancesco
<br>
Thursday, 12 March 2009 <br><br>
</font><font face="georgia" size=3>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
<a href="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</a>. Nevertheless, the troops remain on patrol, a dark
reminder of El Salvador’s past. <br><br>
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 Reagan’s proxy
war twenty years ago are still contenders. The flashpoint in this ongoing
struggle over El Salvador’s 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. <br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.uca.edu.sv/publica/iudop/Web/2008/informe117.pdf">
University of Central America</a> 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
<a href="http://www.equipomaiz.org.sv/">Equipo Maiz</a>, 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. <br><br>
These policies have given rise to El Salvador’s 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
<a href="http://web.worldbank.org/WBSITE/EXTERNAL/DATASTATISTICS/0,,contentMDK:20421402%7EpagePK:64133150%7EpiPK:64133175%7EtheSitePK:239419,00.html#Lower_middle_income">
World Bank</a> as a “lower middle-income country,” based on mean income
calculations from GDP. Mary O’Grady of the
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123534864060444641.html?mod=rss_opinion_main">
Wall Street Journal</a> 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
<a href="http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/nationalreports/latinamericathecaribbean/elsalvador/name,3411,en.html">
UN Development Program</a> report, Salvadorans that don’t migrate or live
on remittances are most often left selling whatever they can in the
streets to feed their families. <br><br>
Meanwhile, the
<a href="http://travel.state.gov/travel/cis_pa_tw/cis/cis_1109.html">US
State Department</a> 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
<a href="http://www.bcr.gob.sv/?x21=46">Salvadoran Central Reserve
Bank</a>. As El Salvador’s 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. <br><br>
But that is where Reagan’s 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
<a href="http://www.elfaro.net/secciones/noticias/20050221/noticias5_20050221.asp">
Technological University of El Salvador</a>. 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.” <br><br>
But equating the FMLN to radical communism isn’t as easy as it once was,
despite the best efforts of the right. The
<a href="http://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2009/0106_central_america_lowenthal.aspx">
Brookings Institute</a> 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 can’t deny Funes as a moderate, conservative North American analysts
and columnists for the Brookings Institute,
<a href="http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,508864,00.html">Fox
News</a>, and the
<a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123534864060444641.html?mod=rss_opinion_main">
Wall Street Journal</a> 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 Salvador’s right wing
media. Meanwhile, US influence is not yet a thing of the
past. On Tuesday El Salvador’s largest circulating daily, the
<a href="http://www.elsalvador.com/mwedh/nota/nota_completa.asp?idCat=6351&idArt=3426239">
Diario de Hoy</a>, 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.” <br><br>
In fact, it was El Salvador’s 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
<a href="http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?lang=e&id=ENGUSA20070718001">
Amnesty International</a>, 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 hasn’t 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
<a href="http://www.pddh.gob.sv/docs/InformepreliminarSuchitoto23julio07.pdf">
Human Rights Ombudsmen</a>, 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.” <br><br>
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,
<a href="http://fuerzasolidaria.org/">Venezuela</a>, 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.” <br><br>
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
<a href="http://www.censos.gob.sv/">latest census</a>. 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.” <br><br>
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 don’t 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. <br><br>
<i>Jesse Stewart and Meredith Defrancesco are journalists with
<a href="http://www.weru.org/">WERU</a> Community Radio in Maine, and
have spent extensive time in El Salvador. WERU is a member of
<a href="http://www.elsalvadorsolidarity.org/">US-El Salvador Sister
Cities</a>, a grassroots solidarity network partnering US cities with
Salvadoran rural communities.<br><br>
<br><br>
</i></font><x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
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