EL SALVADOR:
Yesterday's Idealists, Today's Political Heavyweight
Raúl Gutiérrez

SAN SALVADOR, Apr 24 (IPS) - El Salvador's Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), one of Latin America's leading revolutionary movements in the 1980s, has seen its ideals fade, according to analysts. However, as a political party it has done nothing but grow in strength at the polls.

Since it became a legal political party after the 1992 peace agreement that put an end to a 12-year civil war, the former guerrilla movement has suffered at least three major splits and has lost members, who accuse the leadership of standing in the way of the emergence of a new generation of leaders.

They also complain that there is no room in the party for exercising criticism and self-criticism, and argue that the FMLN has abandoned the principles on which it was founded.

But according to political scientist Héctor Dada Hirezi, it is only normal for many former guerrillas to have gone their own way since the end of the war, and "the FMLN's view, that anyone who left their ranks did so because they sold out, is overly simplistic."

Fifteen years after the end of the 1980-1992 armed conflict, the FMLN is the strongest political force in this Central American country, according to the results of the Mar. 12, 2006 municipal and parliamentary elections, when it even outdid the rightwing governing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) by 4,518 votes.

The leftist opposition party currently holds 32 of the 84 seats in El Salvador's single-chamber parliament, which means that other parties need its support to push their bills through.

Although it came in second in the elections, ARENA holds 34 seats because of the way the voting districts are drawn up, while the National Conciliation party holds 10, the Christian Democratic Party six and Democratic Change two.

"The FMLN was perhaps the most successful political-military force in Latin America," even though when it emerged analysts predicted that it would suffer a swift defeat, said Raymundo Calderón, a professor of sociology at the public University of El Salvador.

However, the rebel group brought to bay the country's military government, whose counterinsurgency effort was heavily supported by the United States, and won an international reputation as a guerrilla force to be reckoned with.

In a joint declaration issued in 1981, France and Mexico recognised the FMLN as "a movement that is representative of the Salvadoran people."

The experts who spoke to IPS argued, however, that the FMLN seems to have squandered in peace-time the political capital and experience forged in the heat of civil war and in several countries that backed the rebel movement, like Nicaragua when it was governed by the leftist Sandinista National Liberation Front (FSLN), Cuba, Vietnam and the former east European socialist bloc.

In Dada Hirezi's view, the FMLN has wasted its accumulated experience, because it has failed to consolidate its position as a political force capable of representing a broad range of social and political groups with the strength required to bring about the political, economic and social changes that the country is in need of.

"The FMLN assimilated the new rules (of democracy), but failed to assume its role of building an alternative that is capable of governing, and failed to leave behind the idea of being the vanguard of the people -- a guerrilla concept -- in order to become a movement that represents the people," said the analyst.

"What is happening to the party is a consequence of the fact that it is not the same thing to wage war against the system as to act as the opposition within the system, while trying to reach the government," he said.

The FMLN emerged in October 1980 as a coalition of five leftwing political and military groups that were born in the early 1970s, with the exception of the Salvadoran Communist Party, which was founded in 1930.

The rebel group had urban roots but soon grew and spread to rural areas, becoming a broad-based popular movement with some 8,000 armed combatants. On several occasions, the FMLN came close to seizing power, despite the strength of the armed forces it was fighting.

The security forces and paramilitary groups combined numbered around 50,000, and had the advice, training, weapons assistance and economic aid of the United States, which in the last few years of the civil war was providing two million dollars a day in support for El Salvador.

"During its process of insertion into the country's institutional political life, the FMLN lost political capacity and creativity," said Calderón, who has published books on modern Salvadoran history. In addition, "its ideas and principles have faded," he told IPS.

Calderón, who is also a leader of the Democratic Centre (CD) party, acknowledged however that the FMLN is one of the former armed groups that has met with the greatest electoral success after joining the political system.

Dada Hirezi concurred, saying the FMLN was "the only former guerrilla movement in Latin America that without reaching the government has won large numbers of votes at the polls."

Salvador Sánchez Cerén, leader of the FMLN bloc in parliament, says that unlike many former guerrilla groups that have failed and have been absorbed by the system, without his party, governance would be impossible, and decisions could not be reached" in El Salvador.

But Sánchez Cerén, who was known as Leonel González when he was a member of the guerrilla organisation's central command, acknowledged that in the current political context, "it will not be easy" to reach the government.

He admitted that the party's "principles and ideas have had to adapt to the new reality," but rejected criticism that it has lost its political creativity and that its proposals have been watered down.

"Many would like the FMLN to abandon its vision of change and to accommodate itself to the system, but although we are on the inside (of the system), we are there to transform it and not to administer the current model," González told IPS emphatically.

Since the first time it took part in elections in 1994, the FMLN has seen the number of votes it wins steadily increase, and has won the post of mayor in most of El Salvador's biggest cities, including San Salvador, besides holding a significant number of seats in parliament. However, it has lost the last three presidential elections to ARENA.

"It is difficult to achieve alternation in power without the FMLN, but it is impossible to conceive of it only with the FMLN," summed up Dada Hirezi.