On March 15, 2009, Mauricio Funes of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) declared victory in El Salvador’s presidential election. He defeated Rodrigo Avila, presidential candidate of the rightwing National Republican Alliance (ARENA) by 51.3 to 48.7 percent. There are 4.2 million registered voters; 60 percent turned out to vote.
The FMLN is an electoral party with historic, revolutionary roots in the country’s 12-year-long civil war, from 1980 to 1992. ARENA, which has been the ruling party in El Salvador for the last 20 years, arose out of U.S. sponsored death squads that claimed the lives of tens of thousands during the civil war. In the recent election, Salvadorans poured into the voting booths in record numbers to repudiate the plutocratic rule of ARENA.
Perhaps only outdone in Latin America by Colombia in its subservience to the United States, El Salvador’s government has historically aligned itself with even the most internationally detested machinations of U.S. imperialism. El Salvador was the first country in Latin America to send troops into Iraq and was the last country to take them out.
El Salvador’s economy lies in shambles and the deterioration of living conditions accelerated tenfold following the nation’s conversion to the U.S. dollar in 2001. The percentage of jobs in the informal economy has reached an estimated 40 percent over the last few years. Millions of Salvadoran workers are living under conditions of super-exploitation and extreme poverty.
During ARENA’s 20 years in power, the nation’s prison population swelled by over 370 percent as a result of a vicious anti-worker campaign disguised as a governmental anti-gang offensive called “la mano dura” or hard hand.
People’s indignation at ARENA’s rule brought them out to vote for the FMLN in the hopes of bringing about lasting change to the country. The elections have served as the barometer of popular sentiment in the nation’s working masses.
José Marroquín, a taxi driver in the nation’s capital of San Salvador, spoke with Liberation newspaper about the reasons he voted for the FMLN. He insisted, “We want real lasting change. The upper echelon is in power and the people have no say. There is too much poverty and everything has become unaffordable. There is nothing to alleviate the worker and ARENA will only work to continue to make the wealthy even wealthier.”
Rightwing propaganda campaign ineffective
Voters had to first see past a well-financed ARENA campaign meant to discredit the FMLN. The propaganda campaign was supported and financed by Washington.
The anti-FMLN campaign included two U.S. members of congress, Trent Franks of Arizona and Dan Burton of Indiana, threatening Salvadoran immigrants in the United States with sanctions if the FMLN were to win. They threatened to take away the Temporary Protected Status afforded to some Salvadoran immigrants as a result of the U.S.-funded civil war. They also threatened to cut remittances, which would endanger the livelihoods of millions of people in El Salvador who survive on money sent from Salvadorans in the United States every day. All the threats were not enough, however, to dissuade a populous dangerously aggravated by the increased exploitation and oppression of ARENA—supported by U.S. imperialism. .
Just hours before Election Day began, ARENA scattered anti-FMLN propaganda from airplanes. This move was clearly in violation of election rules since all campaigning is supposed to officially cease 3 days prior to the election.
Reacting to a growing red-scare campaign by ARENA, Funes campaigned for “real change” but vowed to retain free-trade and other policies that contributed to El Salvador’s economic crisis. He said he would not lift El Salvador’s amnesty for civil war crimes, nor push for the revision of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), and would not reverse El Salvador’s 2001 adoption of the U.S. dollar as its currency.
He tried to fend off accusations of being aligned with Venezuela’s revolutionary process or socialist Cuba, comparing his future role closer to Brazil’s bourgeois-democratic leader Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva.
On the campaign trail, Funes embraced comparisons between himself and President Barack Obama and borrowed the rhetoric of “change” and “hope.” Regardless of whether or not the FMLN embraced these comparisons, El Salvador is not an imperialist country like the United States.
What does Funes victory mean for the Salvadoran people?
For millions of Salvadorans, the victory of the FMLN represents hope and raises the potential for mobilizing the masses, whose expectations for change are great. In this light, the revolutionary history of the FMLN is now an asset.
So what does Funes’s victory actually represent for the working class of El Salvador? Will El Salvador move in the direction of Venezuela or even socialist Cuba? Or will El Salvador follow the paths of Brazil and Argentina? The progressive governments of Brazil and Argentina have looked to strengthen the national bourgeoisie by distancing themselves from U.S. imperialism while affording the working class only limited social reforms.
Projecting clear answers to these questions right now without first observing how things develop in the course of struggle would mean drawing inadequate and un-materialist conclusions. We can, however, begin to understand the role that the FMLN plays for the Salvadoran working class today based on its history.
FMLN’s history of struggle
For 12 years, and even prior to the start of the war, the FMLN and the organizations that it consisted of were the organizational leadership of the people in their struggle against military dictatorship. Always a multi-tendency organization, the FMLN carried out a revolutionary war against the U.S.-funded Salvadoran government.
Over 75,000 people died in the civil war and many thousands more were disappeared. This is a high percentage considering the country’s total population at that time was 6 million.
Viewing the war as one of the fronts in the Cold War—the imperialist struggle to overthrow the socialist camp—the United States set out to squelch the revolutionary upsurge in El Salvador at any cost. CIA involvement and U.S. military training beefed up the Salvadoran capitalist state to carry out one of the bloodiest civil wars in Latin America.
The FMLN arose from the organizational unity of five distinct revolutionary organizations in October of 1980—the Salvadoran Communist Party (PCS), the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL), the Revolutionary People’s Army (ERP), the Armed Forces of National Resistance (FARN) and the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers (PRTC.)
These groups ranged from ideologically socialist organizations fighting for the overthrow of the capitalist state to armed formations of radical peasants and workers fighting to overcome super-exploitation and vile state-sponsored repression.
During the war, membership in the ranks of the FMLN was based on membership within the distinct organizational and theoretical factions of the FMLN. Workers and peasants were thus recruited into a revolutionary armed organization with a single command structure but varying political orientations. The FMLN was organized under the reality of doing battle with an enemy that was far bigger and had far greater resources.
The assassinations of prominent popular opposition leaders, such as Archbishop Oscar Romero, only deepened the nation’s hatred for the brutal government. The intensity of the war crimes and assassinations carried out by the government increased the mass popularity of the FMLN during the war.
A guerrilla radio station by the name of “Radio Venceremos” was the centralizing tool for the FMLN to coordinate its military operations and keep the working masses abreast of revolutionary victories that the government tried to suppress. Many were executed on the spot when Salvadoran soldiers found anyone listening to Radio Venceremos. Many Salvadorans risked their lives just trying to tune their radios to the signal of the revolution.
The FMLN emerged as the organizational leader of the Salvadoran working class as a result of its role during the war. The FMLN and the Salvadoran government signed peace accords in 1992 under great pressure from the United States. This was after an FMLN offensive in November 1989 that demonstrated its strength and the U.S.-backed Salvadoran government’s inability to defeat the guerrillas militarily. Exhausted by years of brutal repression and massacres by the neo-fascist D’Aubuisson government, the civilian population did not rise up to support the FMLN offensive.
The revolutionary struggles of both Nicaragua and El Salvador were defeated by U.S. wars and the resulting reactionary governments bankrupted and impoverished those countries to a dramatic degree.
Since the 1992 peace accords, the FMLN has developed into a mass electoral party that has gained popularity among the masses due to the utter failure of the rightwing to resolve the critical economic situation. It has also gained stature as a participant in the growing alliance of popular Latin American parties that have won electoral victories since the 1998 Venezuelan election of Hugo Chávez.
Electoral victory part of Latin American shift to the left
With Chávez in Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia, Rafael Correa in Ecuador, Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua, and Argentina’s and Brazil’s rejection of U.S. imperialist attempts to isolate socialist Cuba, the FMLN was able to gain breathing space and articulate progressive change.
Yet there are tremendous challenges ahead for the Salvadoran masses. Despite the U.S. State Department’s claim of neutrality regardless of the election outcome, Washington’s interventionist history indicates otherwise. For example, since Daniel Ortega’s election in Nicaragua in 2007, the U.S. government has actively worked to create an opposition and to destabilize the economy.
Revolutionaries and progressives in the United States must continue to defend the FMLN and the Salvadoran people against the threats and attacks of U.S. imperialism. We must be steadfast in our defense of immigrant workers that have been forced out of their nations in an effort to survive the ravages of neoliberalism. We must fight back against the racist war on immigrants here at home. The struggle against national oppression and imperialism is part and parcel of the struggle for socialism.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation sees much reason for optimism in the shift to the left throughout Latin America. Cuba continues to guide the hemisphere and the world as an example of what a society based on meeting the needs of workers could look like. Cuba stands out as an example because workers are in power.
Under the leadership of Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement in alliance with other revolutionaries, Cuba was able to dismantle the capitalist state and build a workers state that could defend the gains of the revolution.
Venezuela has learned and continues to learn from the experience of Cuba. Bolivia is following suit. Each of these countries has their own particular conditions that have shaped the organizational tools of their respective working classes in different ways. However, nothing short of a revolution can ultimately guarantee the needs of workers.
How the FMLN’s victory will affect the Salvadoran working class in the coming months and years to come remains to be seen. Like the taxi driver José Marroquín, the Salvadoran people want “real lasting change.” Surely this is not the last we will hear of the fascist elements of the ARENA party or U.S. imperialist intervention in El Salvador. Today, however, there is much to celebrate for Salvadorans as they have successfully turned back the ultra-right’s consolidation of power over the last 20 years.
