Mixed Results In Salvadoran
Elections
A little over a week after polls closed
in El Salvador’s municipal and legislative elections, the opposing
parties began to prepare for yet another round of campaigning.
Although the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN)
has lost the mayoral ballot in the capital city of San Salvador, it
seems likely that, for the first time in twenty years of right-wing
rule,
the former guerrilla party has a good chance to win the upcoming
presidential ballot in March. In the recently staged elections it
was able to gain three seats in the legislative assembly, winning a
total of 42.5 percent of the votes, trailed by the currently
governing Nationalist Republican Alliance Party (ARENA), with 38.4
percent of the tally.
Achieving widespread popularity has been exceptionally difficult for
the FMLN, given that in the past years the radical rightist ARENA
party has received continuing assistance from kindred governments,
in particular the United States.
ARENA was founded in 1981 by Roberto D’Aubuisson, who amongst others
organized the death squads that murdered thousands of innocent
civilians during the Salvadoran Civil War. He almost certainly
ordered the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, while he was
conducting a mass on March 24, 1980, at the beginning of the war.
Monseñor Romero repeatedly had voiced his concerns about the
injustices being witnessed throughout his country. For his efforts,
he was internationally admired. Shortly before his death, Romero had
urged the Carter administration to halt its support for the El
Salvadoran government in order to contain the violence, but his
request was never answered.
The military forces that were responsible for the death squads were
trained and financed under programs sponsored by the United States
during the Reagan administration, which pursued a radical
anti-communist foreign policy in support of the country’s right-wing
quasi military dictatorship. Beyond the hundreds of millions of
dollars in annual economic and military aid, the assistance went so
far as to provide U.S.-citizenship to many senior Salvadoran
military officers suspect of sanctioning death squad killings.
Today the ARENA party still idolizes and commemorates their founder
D’Aubuisson, and scores of those who committed severe human rights
violations in the 1970s and 1980s are still active members of the
party, observed human rights lawyer David Morales in an interview
with Amnesty International. Despite their agenda of crimes,
corruption, fraud and murder, the United States embassy in San
Salvador continues until this day to support ARENA and the rightist
extremist authorities in El Salvador.
Republicans Help Human Rights Abusers
In the 2004 elections, a few days before Salvadorans were scheduled
to cast their votes, three U.S. Republican congressmen went before
the Foreign Relations Committee of the House of Representatives to
make a prediction about how U.S. policy towards El Salvador would
change in the event of a FMLN victory at the polls. They warned that
remittances from Salvadorans working in the U.S. would no longer be
sent to El Salvador (they obviously could not speak in the advent of
what would happen in an Obama victory).
They also predicted that the Salvadorans’ temporary protected status
(TPS), a visa program that currently allows 229,000 paroled
Salvadorans to live and work in the U.S., might not be extended if
the FMLN managed to defeat ARENA. The remittances that family
members abroad send back to loved ones in El Salvador are essential
to the economic survival of relatives back home, as these funds make
up more than 17 percent of the country’s GDP. The anxiety caused by
the U.S. congressmens’ minatory remarks that the cash flow might dry
up spread quickly throughout the country and doubtlessly helped the
right-wing ARENA candidate Antonio Saca, to win the presidency. The
U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador during that period, Hugh Douglas
Barkley, did not bother to clarify the issue until after the
election, belatedly maintaining that the statements of the
congressmen would not necessarily affect the Sate Department policy.
U.S. Embassy Rules
Although the current chief of mission in El Salvador, Ambassador
Charles Glazer, has declared that no U.S. intervention will occur in
this round of elections, there already has been direct and indirect
interference. This certainly was the case when it came to the
behavior one of his predecessors, Rose Likins, who during the Bush
presidency openly and dramatically interfered in the internal
affairs of El Salvador. Likins basically informed Salvadorans that
if the FMLN wins, they lose when it comes to continuing to secure
U.S. assistance.
Throughout the past years of participating in El Salvador’s regular
elections after demobilizing and becoming part of the country’s
electoral process, the FMLN has had to battle brazenly false
accusations against it, mainly coming from the U.S. embassy and
aimed at providing propagandistic support of ARENA. In 2007 the
chairman of the International Republican Institute (IRI), Senator
John McCain, presented President Saca with the “Freedom Award” for
the “dramatic democratic and economic progress” that his leadership
had brought to El Salvador.
This collaboration all but ignored the widespread corruption that
permeated the country as well as the systematic political
assassinations of left wing partisans and FMLN activists that
continued to routinely take place under ARENA’s auspices. However,
U.S. conservative circles did not limit their influence to smearing
the reputation of well-known FMLN personalities; they also have
attempted to gloss over ARENA’s well established reputation of
tacitly backing death-squad activities.
In February 2008, the United States director of National
Intelligence Michael McConnell, without a shred of cited evidence to
support his charges, stated in his Annual Threat Assessment to the
U.S. Senate, that he expects “[Hugo] Chavez to provide generous
campaign funding to the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN)
in El Salvador in its bid to secure the presidency in the 2009
election.” As if in a carefully choreographed script, President Saca
immediately consulted his ambassador to Venezuela and then asked
U.S. President Bush to investigate such alleged activities by the
FMLN. Mauricio Funes, FMLN presidential candidate in the 2009
elections, and Venezuelan President Chavez renounced these
accusations. There was never any proof that was brought forth to
support McConnell’s thesis, however the FMLN palpably lost some of
its democratic luster in the upcoming election among those sensitive
to such charges.
International Meddling – the German Connection
It should be known that it is not only the U.S. that has long
meddled in Salvadoran affairs. Sigfrido Reyes Morales, a delegate
from the FMLN, who has pinpointed an extensive international network
supporting the ARENA party, provided new evidence for such charges
in an interview with the German leftist newspaper “junge Welt.” He
claimed that assistance comes from rightist groups in the U.S. and
Latin America as well as in Asia and Europe.
The Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung, a foundation that is related to the
German right wing Christian Social Union party, has recently
supported a workshop backed by the ARENA-linked Center of Political
Studies on how to prevent the FMLN from gaining power. Along with
the German Christian Democratic Adenauer Foundation, the
Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung is known for its consistent support for
right-wing foreign policy causes, usually sanctioned by the U.S.
Republican party. The author and Venezuelan political advisor to the
anti-Chavez opposition, Alfredo Keller describes in a 90-page manual
how to manipulate surveys and slander the character of Mauricio
Funes. He advises his Salvadoran readers how to depict FMLN
presidential candidate Funes as a “puppet of communist hardliners,”
in order to deter Salvadorans from voting for the FMLN candidates,
reports the Berlin newspaper “taz.”
In Germany, The Left party, concerned about the meddling of the
Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung asked the German federal government to
investigate the activities of the foundation, because it had
actively intervened in the electoral process in El Salvador, and
therefore would seem to have violated German law. Berlin authorities
dismissed the case, stating that the Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung had only
recommended Keller as a respectable expert and restricted its
activities to paying for his travel expenses. The Center for
Political Studies has been working together with the German
foundation for years, but only the Latin American Center was the
originator of the questionable paper. As a result, the German
government concluded that the Hanns-Seidel-Stiftung did not
interfere with Salvadoran politics. Moreover the German authorities
maintained that the study served the research of changes in society
and did not necessarily represent a manipulation of material. Few
were satisfied by this Byzantine explanation.
Blackballing the FMLN
Meanwhile Saca continues his hard-right campaign in order to raise
fear and concerns among the Salvadoran community in the U.S. and at
home, that if the FMLN wins, the country will quickly come to live
under a “communist dictatorship.” Considering that FMLN candidate
Funes is a rather moderate figure, this accusation invites ridicule
from the informed. A few days before the legislative and municipal
elections – in which the FMLN was defeated – Saca spread the word
that he had prepared a report to the United Nations and the
Organization of American States (OAS) that would disclose an
affiliation between mara, criminal youth gangs, and the FMLN.
Knowing that this arrant prevarication could not be put to rest
until after the election, he was able to win a few swing votes by
this subterfuge. However, the foul play did not end here; reports on
vote buying involving both cash and food payments have persisted
throughout the electoral process, with Saca engrossed in the thick
of it.
Yet another scandal appeared that involved the transportation of
voters to the polls provided by ARENA. Government officials not only
influenced the voters’ decision by offering them free
transportation, but ARENA also provided the extra service of taking
voters from an area where the party was strongly represented to a
region where their success was at stake and every vote counted. This
might have been the determining factor in ARENA’s surprising victory
in the mayoral race in San Salvador. According to Latinnews, Funes
complained that “10,000 people had been shipped in.” In addition to
that contention, CISPES, the pro-FMLN Committee in Solidarity with
the People of El Salvador, reported an “alarming number of
foreigners” in El Salvador on the day of the election. FMLN
partisans were convinced that ARENA militants had given Nicaraguans
and Guatemalans false Salvadoran papers as well as cash bribes in
order to persuade some to vote for ARENA.
Rising Youth Activism
Seeing corruption at work in their country, has prompted many young
Salvadorans to take part in a movement aimed at establishing a more
transparent and principled electoral process. The numbers of such
activist groups are still relatively small but continuously
expanding. This is a remarkable process, taking into account that in
the past several years dozens of political activists from
anti-government factions have been murdered and most of these crimes
remain unsolved. The online magazine Upside Down World has reported
on the various concerns that young campaigners hold and that they
have asked for changes in the voter registry, since the current one
was devised in accordance with the 1992 census. One election
observer from a youth radio collective has told some journalists
that they would “find people in the electoral rolls who died up to
16 years ago.”
Despite the doubts voiced by the populace and FMLN party militants
about the inaccuracy of the voting procedure, U.S. policy makers
remain adamant that fraud is unlikely to take place. In San
Salvador, U.S. Ambassador Glazer dismissed such demurrers regarding
U.S. pressure on the legislative ballot, claiming that international
observers would ensure the integrity of the election. However, there
were only approximately 190 observers from the European Union and
the OAS in the country, not enough to really do the job. Moreover,
the neutrality of some of the other organizations overlooking the
voting is questionable. For instance, institutions like the
International Republican Institute, a U.S. publically-funded heavy
hitter for rightwing foreign policy causes, which previously has
given Antonio Saca its “Freedom Award,” also was sending observers
to El Salvador. The increasing political activism in the country and
the call for fair elections by at least one youth faction might be
the most promising way to achieve democratic behavior in practice.
This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Kira Vinke
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