My Thoughts on the Salvadoran Election

I came down to El Salvador last week to visit friends and be here for an historic presidential election. As I’m sure you may have heard (or maybe not considering how Central American doesn’t exactly dominate US news cycles), on Sunday, for the first time since gaining independence from Spain a century and a half ago, Salvadorans elected a leftist president. The first Salvadoran president not from the ruling elite or a military caudillo.

In Mauricio Funes, the FMLN, which is made up of ex-guerillas and became an official party after the 1992 peace accords, nominated a non ex-combatant for the first time. In a country where most major media outlets are parrots for the government, Funes was a popular television journalist with a reputation for asking hard questions and speaking truth to power. For lack of a better comparison, he is El Salvador’s Tim Russert.

Funes was an impressive candidate in many ways. He campaigned as a moderate, talked about the importance of a good relationship with the United States, and traded in his red FMLN gear for white guayaberas, dark business suits and designer glasses. His campaign even gain the backing of Salvadoran businessman. In television interviews, he skillfully answered loaded questions. When the right tried to paint him as a radical who would become a Salvadoran Chavez, he kept his cool. His campaign billboards, television spots, and posters had a level of message sophistication atypical of FMLN campaigns. That message was inspirational, with themes similar to Barack Obama’s — hope, change, depolarization of politics.

Beyond Funes himself, the election says a lot about how far El Salvador has come as a people. The country and its politics are still very polarized, seventeen years after the end of a 12-year long civil war that spilled the blood of 75,000 people, including American nuns, Spanish Jesuits, scores of Salvadoran priests and Archbishop Oscar Romero (whom many regard as a modern-day saint). I would be remiss to not mention that the Reagan Administration fueled the civil war to the tune of $1.5 million a day despite reports of atrocoties committed by the Salvadoran government. (This election, Obama’s State Dept. publicly stated neutrality on the race, a big shift from the Bush Administration, who in 2004 said an FMLN win would harm El Salvador’s relationship with the US. Several members of Congress penned a letter to Sec. Clinton asking that TPS [temporary protective status] be revisited for Salvadoran immigrants if the FMLN were to win).

Yet despite this violent recent history, a peaceful transfer of power is about to take place.

The right tried to scare people into voting for ARENA, labeling the FMLN as violent communists, a misleading characterization that didn’t even fit them during the war. But it didn’t work this time. The newspapers looked like advertisements for ARENA and slammed the FMLN. But Funes’s message still got out, in large part thanks to the democratizing force of the internet (Half of El Salvador’s population is under 25 and grows more internet savvy by the day). That overwhelmingly young population, born after the war or not old enough to remember it, isn’t falling for Cold War rhetoric. And even some veterans of the civil war who fought on the side of the government, joined up with their former combat adversaries to back Funes.

When the election results were announced, word spread that people would gather to celebrate at Redondel Masferrer, a large traffic circle in an upscale neighborhood, essentially in ARENA’s back yard, named after another famous Salvadoran journalist. Tens of thousands of FMLN supporters came. They cut through the Citi Bank parking lot, crowded onto the balconies of a modern shopping center, and filed in and out of the Burger King to see television coverage of ARENA party candidate Rodrigo Avila’s concession speech.

See photos from Masferrer and Election Day here.

Those gathered were not just political activists celebrating their candidate’s victory. Some were campesinos who spent years in refugee camps during the war before being able to travel back to their hometowns… torture victims persecuted for their political beliefs or for being related to or knowing someone who held political beliefs deemed subversive… survivors of massacres… ex-combatants who lived the horrors of war and have never received treatment for the psychological trauma they endured… US residents and citizens who fled El Salvador for political or economic reasons years ago and came back to vote and witness this historic event… children belonging to all of the above who have learned from their elders that the 80s is not a road they want to go down again.

And many more were mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, who until this day, have constantly wondered: Did my loved one die in vain?

That’s a tremendous burden to place on one person. Despite the high hopes and expectations, like President Obama, Funes faces seemingly insurmountable problems.

As many as 60% of Salvadorans live in poverty and probably another 20% live on the brink. As much as one third of El Salvador’s GDP comes from remittances sent home from the millions of Salvadoran relatives who live and work in the US. In short, El Salvador’s number one export is people, which adds a multiplying effect to the current economic crisis. The country desperately needs an alternative approach to the rampant gang problem — to not just lock up young people in overcrowded prisons where they fester with fellow gang members, but to give the country’s youth an alternative to violence. But before tackling these and other problems, Funes will have to assemble a team from a pool of people who have never governed before. And the press and the political right aren’t likely going to give him much time before declaring him a failure.

That’s what lies ahead, but for now, El Salvador and this foreign observer are relishing in the symbolism of the moment — the power of the human spirit to walk through hell and still maintain a flicker of hope that it will emerge… the capacity for understanding and reconciliation of the once bitterly divided… how, with time, democracy can exist in a land with such a long and enduring history of repression.

Tags: 2009 Presidential Election, ARENA, Avila, El Salvador, FMLN, Funes, Masferrer