Features » December 10, 2008
El Salvador’s New Left (cont’d)
FMLN party faithful celebrate the late Jorge Schafik Handal's 78th birthday in Parque Cuscatlán on Oct. 12.
Ex-combatant communities: the FMLN’s voto duro
One voting bloc that doesn't want El Salvador's FMLN party to become political pragmatists is the ex-combatant community that spent much of the war in exile.
This group—the party's base—is known as the "voto duro" (or hard vote), and they received appropriated land from the government after the 1992 peace accords. For its members, a victory by the FMLN would help heal wounds inflicted by government repression, burned villages, and murdered family members. It would also mandate a path toward socialism.
The community of Ciudad Romero—in the Bajo Lempa region of Usulután province, where the Rio Lempa empties into the Pacific Ocean—was born from the war's ashes. It was named after El Salvador's martyred Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was murdered by a military assassin on March 24, 1980, for condemning the government's repression of the peasantry.
"Romero denounced everything we wanted to denounce but couldn't," says José Nohé Reyes Granados, 30, who is writing a book about his community's journey. "He was the voice for those without a voice. ... When they killed him, we realized that talking was futile. They killed the archbishop ... who could speak now? The only path was armed resistance."
Two months later, the military attacked the village where Reyes and his family lived in La Union—a province in eastern El Salvador—because many in the community were suspected of being active in the guerrilla movement. Some 600 villagers fled across the Lempa River to neighboring Honduras—under the cover of night because an equally repressive Honduran military was guarding the border.
The Organization of American States learned of the refugees' plight and gave them food and shelter for six months in Honduras, until the Panamanian government agreed to shelter them—under the condition that the Salvadorans would help clear roads through the thick jungle, from Panama City to the Atlantic Ocean.
But when Panama's leftist President Omar Torrijos was assassinated a year later, the Salvadorans found themselves politically isolated. They built a village deep in the jungle that they named Ciudad Romero, or Romero City. There, community members built homes and a church, in which they painted a mural of their beloved archbishop. They were able to pick up a radio signal from the FMLN rebels, which allowed them to follow events back home, as they lived in exile for a decade.
In November 1989, the FMLN launched a successful offensive in both San Salvador and in the countryside, proving to the military regime that it had the popular support to continue its resistance indefinitely. The offensive, coupled with the military's massacre of six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America, forced the government to negotiate with the FMLN.
The refugees took down the church wall, piece-by-piece, and returned to El Salvador with the mural in tow. The government granted land in Bajo Lempa to the approximately 220 families that represented Ciudad Romero, and there they arrived in March 1991 to build another community from scratch.
Approximately 1,000 people live today in Ciudad Romero, which operates under the umbrella of the Associacion Mangle, a nonprofit rural development organization that works with 70 communities to facilitate public projects, such as building homes or protecting the nearby endangered mangrove forests. The association also operates Radio Mangle, a radio station in nearby San Nicolas that broadcasts music, news and cultural programming.
Other communities in the Associacion Mangle share similarly dramatic war stories. The residents of San Hilario and Amando Lopez were originally from Morazán and La Union, provinces in eastern El Salvador where the guerrilla was based, because of their remoteness and access to the Honduran and Nicaraguan borders. Most joined the rebels or were active in the resistance. Like Ciudad Romero, many had to leave the country when the military arrived in their villages.
San Hilario resident Arnoldo Ortiz, who joined the guerrilla at age 14 in 1980, never thought he'd survive the war—and see the other side. "The transition from armed conflict to peace has been difficult because I grew up with the war," he says. "We arrived from a process where we didn't know much about civilian life. We had no idea about houses, land or economics.
"What we learned during the war was to live together like brothers. As combatants, we shared everything to survive... whether it was a tortilla, a cookie or a cigar."
Mariela Luciña Hernandez, 45, of Amando Lopez—a community named after one of the Jesuit priests the military murdered in 1989—was a doctor with the rebels. The military captured and tortured her in 1981, and she later escaped to Nicaragua.
Today, Hernandez directs an association of community women and works with war veterans. She says the most important thing she and her compañeros learned during that time is how to organize and work together.
"We work to organize on a local level for the party, to advance the cause through the community, through Radio Mangle," she says. "If we can plant corn, and harvest all the seeds we plant, the FMLN can buy them and feed the people. The country has to change, bit by bit."
In a striking turn of the political tide, Ciudad Romero's neighbors in Nuevo Amanecer now join them in wearing the red shirts of the FMLN. The military granted land to ex-soldiers, who named their community Nuevo Amanecer ("a new dawn"), and they have remained faithful to the ARENA-government, until little by little, Reyes says, they realized that ARENA was doing little to help their community. For 20 years, they've struggled with limited water access and agricultural projects.
Enemies during the war, Ciudad Romero and Nuevo Amanecer are now allies, and they represent the base of the FMLN.
Modern capitalism or road to socialism?
The incumbent ARENA party has filled the airwaves, the daily newspapers and the sympathetic ears within the Bush administration with rhetoric that an FMLN presidential victory would be akin to a communist takeover of El Salvador — or worse.
On Sept. 18, at the American Enterprise Institute — a conservative think tank in D.C. — Salvadoran Minister of Foreign Affairs Marisol Argueta appealed to the U.S. government to not let “dangerous populists” win the upcoming election.
El Salvador’s two nationally distributed newspapers, El Diario de Hoy and La Prensa Grafica, have run almost daily reports trying to link the FMLN to Chávez’s Venezuelan oil money, the Colombian FARC rebels’ arms- and drug-running activities, Cuban dictator Fidel Castro’s worldview, or Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega’s suppression of democracy.
ARENA’s Saca has all but called Funes a puppet of the FMLN, telling CNN’s Spanish-language network in February, “If it flies like a duck, swims like a duck and eats like a duck, it’s a duck … The FMLN is a communist party. Its ideas haven’t changed.”
A foreign nongovernmental organization worker told In These Times that a frightened, elderly peasant woman had recently asked her if it was true that if el frente won, the elderly would be “turned into soap.”
But is today’s FMLN truly a Cold War-era throwback? Would it overturn capitalism, kick out foreign corporations, cancel free-trade deals and expropriate land?
Hardly, says economist Martinez.
“If you read their government plan, you’ll see that it’s a plan to modernize capitalism in El Salvador,” she says. “It’s an economic plan with better opportunities to distribute wealth and social services among the population, and [it] insists on combating poverty and guaranteeing food security for sectors that have traditionally been excluded from the political process. … What we’re seeing is a return to pragmatism.”
The 96-page FMLN plan features a smiling young woman in a white dress on its cover. She is about to breastfeed her healthy baby. Behind her is the blue and white Salvadoran flag. The red text on the cover, above the party logo, reads: “Nace la Esperanza, Viene el Cambio” (“The Hope is Born, the Change Arrives”).
In it, el frente proposes to stimulate the economy on local levels, such as by offering micro-loans and credit and investments for small- and medium-sized businesses, though it stops short of explaining which corporations or members of the land-owning elite will pay more taxes to foot the bill.
Included in the manual are a two-page letter from Funes and a one-page letter from vice presidential candidate Salvador Sánchez Cerén, a member of the party’s old guard. Herein lies doubt as to whether the party has modernized, after all.
Cerén, 65, was known as Comandante Leonel González during the war, and took the party’s reins after Handal died. He was a founding father of the Popular Liberation Front, one of five opposition groups that merged to form the FMLN in 1980.
To former FMLN member Julio Hernandez, Cerén is proof that the party is still living in the past.
“This is a rare combination in which you have Funes, a fresh, modern figure, but [the influence on the party of] Hugo Chávez is very visible, especially his money,” Hernandez says. “The FMLN [must] open up the party, but they’re not doing so.”
Hernandez served in the guerrilla and reached the party’s upper echelons in 1992. He says he felt confident that el frente was growing more moderate — even as some of the rebels’ heroes, such as Joaquin Villalobos, refused to participate in the post-war FMLN. Hernandez resigned in 2005 after the old guard insisted on running Schafik Handal as its candidate — instead of a more pragmatic choice, like Funes. FMLN was subsequently trounced by ARENA.
Hernandez has since formed a new, left-of-center political party called the Revolutionary Democratic Front. He applauds FMLN’s decision to run Funes this time around, but he says the party is feeding the Salvadoran people a mixed message.
“The FMLN … gives Funes the title of presidential candidate, but that’s it,” Hernandez says. “All of the [congressional] candidates are from the hard line, the linea dura. The candidate frequently says one thing, but the party base says another. These aren’t mistakes, but ways to show Funes who’s in charge.”
Change, poco a poco
The ubiquitous photos of Guevara, and of Schafik Handal palling around with the three maestros of Latin American socialism — Castro, Chávez and Morales — still adorn the lobby of the FMLN’s unpretentious headquarters in San Salvador. The ceiling fan clanks more than it whirs, and the coffee inside the dispenser has long since gone cold. The little money el frente does have for the campaign is certainly not spent on office amenities.
When Sigfrido Reyes enters the room dressed in a partly unbuttoned, checkered shirt, it isn’t immediately obvious that he is the party’s chief of communications and one of its most influential members.
Called Joaquin during the war, Reyes, 48, has since earned a master’s degree in economic policy at Columbia University in New York. He attended the Democratic National Convention in Denver in August and met with President-elect Obama’s foreign policy advisers to help forge a relationship between the FMLN and Democrats.
“All political movements, all social bodies, change,” Reyes says. “For us, change isn’t bad. It’s a natural state of adapting. We don’t believe that the FMLN is a party that represents just the left in this society, but that it’s obligated to represent other sectors. We don’t just represent the workers, but also the national businesses that take the risk of investing in our country.” The FMLN, he says, is not “a monolithic body.”
CAFTA is an example of a topic that some FMLN officials have condemned outright on the campaign trail, yet Funes says he wouldn’t withdraw from the trade agreement as president.
Reyes concedes that, “El Salvador was told that CAFTA would create thousands of businesses, that it would create an inundation of foreign investment, a transfer of technology, and that the institutions of justice and labor would work better,” he says. “The reality is that hasn’t happened.”
Hato Hasbun, one of Funes’ closest personal advisers and his onetime sociology professor, refuses to suggest that the FMLN party would make any radical changes upon winning power.
“We need to respect the international agreements that have been signed,” Hasburn says, “but nothing is written in stone, and we’re not going to ideologize the discussion. We’ll make decisions based on the current reality. We want to be a responsible government, not a reactionary one.”
Unlike the late Schafik Handal and other hardliners within el frente, Funes enjoys some support within the Salvadoran business community. This support includes a wealthy fraternity of supporters with no ties to the FMLN, many of whom call themselves “amigos de Mauricio.”
“One interesting thing about Funes is that there are clearly business sectors that are willing to live with him,” says Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America, a coalition that promotes human rights, democracy, and social and economic justice in the region. “Though they may not be enthusiastic, they’re unhappy with the last 20 years of ARENA rule.”
Thale says he didn’t realize how much things had changed since the war until he recently ran into a former guerrilla commander, whom he knew, at a hotel in San Salvador. When asked what he was up to, the former commander replied that he was off to a business meeting at the chamber of commerce.
Appealing to the base
Where critics see mixed messages between Funes and the party’s hardliners, Martinez sees merely a difference in political approach.
“El frente is a social democratic party now, but a party that claims it’s developing toward a socialist revolution. They’re doing that for their base … people in rural areas who were combatants or families of ex-combatants. If el frente were to renounce their effort to build a socialist society, they would lose a big chunk of what they consider their solidarity vote, their voto duro.”
On a Sunday morning in mid-October, the voto duro was not hard to find. They often travel in a sea of red, singing songs and reciting poems about their fallen comandantes. Back in Parque Cuscatlán, a familiar song carried through the warm Central American air. At the opposite end of the park, a well-dressed crowd was seated under a white tent, listening to loudspeakers that crooned Frank Sinatra’s voice, and his ode to the city of world capitalism, “New York, New York.”
El Salvador remains a country living in the past and present — divided by ideological lines, between left and right, and with many of the same faces from the civil war, shouting toward anyone who will listen.
Whether Mauricio Funes will bridge that divide — or disappear into it — remains an open question.
This reporting was made possible by a grant from Communitas.
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Appeared in the December 2008 Issue
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