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Elections in El Salvador Invoke Rivalries of
Civil War Years
Elections in El Salvador Invoke Rivalries of
Civil War Years
By
ELISABETH MALKIN
SAN SALVADOR — El Salvador’s presidential
election is only days away, and prime time
television here is jammed with campaign
commercials featuring snappy jingles,
earnest endorsements — and President Hugo
Chávez of Venezuela.
In an ad for the party in power, an image of
its candidate, Rodrigo Ávila, left, is
superimposed on an image of Mr. Funes.
After 20 years in power, the right-wing
Nationalist Republican Alliance, known as
Arena, faces the first real challenge to its
hold on the government from Mauricio Funes,
a former television talk show host who is
the candidate for the left-wing F.M.L.N.
The campaign has been vicious. Mr. Funes is
popular after his years as a television
journalist, so Arena does not attack him
directly. Instead, it has linked the F.M.L.N.,
the party of El Salvador’s former
guerrillas, to Latin America’s far-left
leaders.
Images of Mr. Chávez appear during almost
every commercial break in montages of grainy
clips that also feature scenes of street
chaos and camouflaged soldiers. The message
is less than subtle: Elect Mr. Funes as
president and the F.M.L.N. will “surrender”
the country to the socialist camp.
The vitriol, analysts say, stems from El
Salvador’s 12-year civil war, when the two
parties were on opposite ends of the
conflict. During the war, which ended in
1992, F.M.L.N. guerrillas fought the
American-backed military, while Arena argued
for a free hand in defeating them. To this
day, the party anthem vows that the nation
will be “the tomb where the Reds meet their
end.”
“Arena and the F.M.L.N. were born in
opposition to each other,” said Álvaro
Artiga, a political scientist at the Central
American University. “This is a re-edition
of the conflict.”
The attack advertisements seem to be
working. Mr. Funes, the left-wing candidate,
began the campaign with a double-digit lead
in polls, but he is now in a virtual tie in
most of them with the Arena candidate,
Rodrigo Ávila, the former chief of the
country’s national police.
For his part, Mr. Funes contends that Arena
is preparing to commit fraud on election day
this Sunday by busing in voters from
neighboring countries with fake voting
cards.
José Antonio de Gabriel, the deputy chief of
the European Union’s election observer
mission, said the electoral system had
enough safeguards against any large-scale
attempt at fraud. But Arena’s broad support
in the media, its spending advantage and the
negative campaign have all contributed to
what he called “the absence of a level
playing field.”
There is a fear that a very close election
could lead to unrest, even though both
parties have abided by national and local
election results before. “If the margin is
small, it will be hard for the Frente to
admit a loss,” said Roberto Rubio-Fabián,
executive director of Funde, a research
organization here, referring to the F.M.L.N.
“There could be a group that says this is
proof that the democratic way doesn’t work.”
After the civil war ended, the guerrillas
demobilized and entered politics. The
F.M.L.N. — officially the Farabundo Martí
National Liberation Front — won town halls
and seats in the Legislative Assembly, but
never the presidency.
“It has to be somebody like Funes,” said
Leonel Gómez, a political analyst. “For the
first time, you have somebody who’s
electable. He doesn’t smell like a
comandante.”
Mr. Funes’s bid has been helped by a general
weariness with Arena’s two decades in power.
The party was founded in 1981 by Roberto
d’Aubuisson, who was accused of organizing
death squads during the civil war.
El Salvador’s business elite has been the
force, and the money, behind Arena, but
social programs have helped it win four
presidential elections. During his campaign,
Mr. Ávila has given away new houses,
inaugurated day care centers and posed for
snapshots with applicants at job fairs.
Still, for a business-friendly government,
Arena has a middling record. Average annual
growth since 1999 has been below 3 percent,
according to the Inter-American Development
Bank, below the rates in most of the
country’s neighbors. Over half of
Salvadorans live in poverty, many of them in
neighborhoods like La Chacra, to San
Salvador’s east, with its small concrete
houses, tin shacks, gang violence and drugs.
“In my 22 years, people have always
complained about the same thing,” said
Abraham Moisés Ticas, an unemployed
mechanic. “They have been governing for such
a long time, but there’s still no work.”
Still, there is a large minority in the
neighborhood that is loyal to Arena, like
Ana Dinora Pérez, 35. She ticked off the
government programs that help her family get
by on her husband’s salary as a bus driver:
free medicine, toys and school supplies for
her two children.
She fears that the F.M.L.N. could turn the
country into Venezuela, where she mistakenly
believes a war is taking place. “I want us
to continue as we are, in peace,” she said.
Juan Héctor Vidal, a consultant to El
Salvador’s main business association, said
that growth was sacrificed to Arena’s
emphasis on stability. In 2001, El Salvador
adopted the dollar as its currency. “They
dollarized the economy at the cost of
employment and production — and of course
social stability,” he said.
Critics argue that Arena is a party of crony
capitalism that favors a few large business
interests and does not allow competition.
“Businessmen use the state to their economic
advantage,” said Héctor Dada, a center-left
politician advising Mr. Funes.
As the global recession hits, the government
has fewer options. An estimated one-quarter
of Salvadorans live in the United States,
and the remittances they send back to
support their families account for 18
percent of the country’s gross domestic
product.
Violent crime is growing, and the country’s
legal system is unable to stop it. Both
candidates promise a raft of programs to
help the poor, and for all their angry
diatribes, they sound alike when they talk
about creating jobs, giving public pensions
to the elderly and offering help for young
people.
But Mr. Funes’s critics contend that he is
merely a puppet of the former guerrillas who
still hold power in the F.M.L.N., noting
that his vice-presidential candidate,
Salvador Sánchez Cerén, used to be a
guerrilla commander. As evidence that Mr.
Chávez is funneling money to the F.M.L.N.
campaign, they point to a program in which
Venezuela sells subsidized fuel to the
party’s mayors.
In the campaign’s final days, Mr. Funes has
racked up endorsements from centrists and
promised to build bridges to the
conservative business elite by emulating
Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula
da Silva. “I have to make an effort to
reduce their fears,” Mr. Funes said.
But many minds are already made up. “Arena
has been a lover of liberty, of progress and
free religion,” said Francisco Martínez, a
spare parts salesman.
On the other side, Manuel Ortiz is just as
fervent. He just lost his factory job. “The
businessmen are fearful that change is
coming,” he said. “They think that it will
become like Venezuela and Cuba. But that’s a
lie.” |
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