On March 21st, Schafik Handal, the candidate for the left-wing party FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martà para la Liberación Nacional/Farabundo Martà National Liberation Front), lost the presidential election to the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). In what was only the fourth presidential election in El Salvador’s history, the rightist ARENA won by a wide margin, enjoying victories in most regions of the country.
The victory of pro-American ARENA candidate Tony Saca was not rendered simply by the will of the Salvadoran people. The party’s votes were secured through a campaign of fear and intimidation. These scare tactics came from party activists, right-wing political interest groups, and the corporate elite. But they also had the support—both tacit and spoken—of the Bush administration. Many critics attribute ARENA’s dominating victory to this American involvement.
The FMLN agenda is a socialist platform. Accordingly, its economic and social policies address the realities of the working-class and poor majority of El Salvador, whose interests are not represented by ARENA, the party of the business elite. The FMLN favors a return to the national currency - the colon - from the US dollar, which was introduced into circulation three years ago and has been responsible for rising prices and falling wages in El Salvador. The FMLN also soundly rejected the terms of the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and promised to stymie its implementation in the region, should Handal be elected.
Bush feared that the future of CAFTA, a hallmark of his administration’s election year foreign policy agenda in this hemisphere, would be doomed were El Salvador to pull out of the deal. And so the administration acted in its interests to prevent a change in the leadership of the country.
In the months, weeks, and days leading up to the election, Bush’s allies and senior members of the administration made statements indicating that El Salvador’s relationship with the US—both economic and political—would be compromised in the event of an FMLN win. These statements bolstered a series of scare tactics put forth by ARENA concerning immigration policies and remittances.
Saca’s campaign aired ads warning that Salvadorans living in the US could be deported if the FMLN won. Many Salvadoran immigrants are here in the US provisionally, under the auspices of the Temporary Protective Status program, which grants temporary immigration status for periods of up to 18 months to eligible immigrants from designated countries during times of war, humanitarian crises, or natural disaster. Some fear that this program is subject to the political will of Washington.
In a country whose people rely on more than $2 billion sent from relatives living in the US, the threat of a change in immigration policy was dire. About 28 percent of El Salvador’s adult population receives money from US-based relatives and this money accounts for over half of El Salvador’s GDP. These remittances allow many Salvadorans the ability to gain purchasing power despite the dollarization of the economy.
The US did nothing to dispute these allegations. Otto Reich—President Bush’s special envoy for the Western Hemisphere, and Roger Noriega—assistant secretary of state, reiterated ARENA’s assertion that El Salvador-US relations could indeed suffer if the FMLN won the election. The administration also upped US presence in the country with a trip by Florida governor and presidential brother Jeb Bush in February, thinly veiled as a CAFTA campaign tour. And in the days immediately prior to the election, Republican Representative Thomas Tancredo threatened to introduce legislation to “control� the flow of remittances in the event of an FMLN victory.
The Saca campaign, in its numerous print, radio, and television ads, also warned of the “communist threat� posed by the FMLN and its candidate, Handal. They likened the candidate to Fidel Castro and used a variety of scare tactics, claiming that an FMLN victory would bring about the loss of personal property and the decline of the country’s financial condition. Maquila (sweatshop) owners broadcasted this message to their workers, stating that an FMLN victory would lead to layoffs and plant closings.
Handal is a former guerilla leader in the civil war in which the leftist rebels battled the oligarchic dictatorship for more than a decade, ending with the peace accords signed in 1992. Government forces were heavily financed by the US government as a southern front in the Americas in the war against communism. It is estimated that $1 million USD a day was given to government forces. ARENA, consolidated as a political party during the war, is linked to the death squads that terrorized civilians during the conflict.
This election renewed the Cold War hatreds and fears of the eighties, a decade in which the US funded proxy wars around the world to secure its economic and political hegemony. In the eyes of the Bush administration, the recent victories of the left in Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina signaled a renewed threat to this hegemony and to the unhindered continuation of North America’s neoliberal economic policies and treaties such as CAFTA. Clearly the Bush administration was threatened by the FMLN and its radical vision of social, political, and economic change, particularly in a country characterized by extreme wealth and extreme poverty.
ARENA’s victory was also assured by irregularities on voting day that will likely go unpunished by the partisan, pro-ARENA Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) which conducts and certifies elections. It was reported to international observers that several factory owners had stripped their employees of their D.U.I., the national identification card needed at the polls, immediately prior to the election. There were widespread reports of vote-buying by the party, in addition to other forms of intimidation.
But no one disputes the potency of US intervention in this election and the overwhelming effect it had on the outcome of the vote. Commentators predicted that the US could not—and would not—allow an FMLN victory. They were right. The US was willing to sacrifice the Salvadoran people’s right to a free and fair election. El Salvador now pays the price.
Cristina Gallo recently traveled to El Salvador as a guest of the FMLN and served as an international observer on the day of the elections.
Frente Farabundo Martà para la Liberación National (FMLN)
www.fmln.org.sv
Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES)
www.cispes.org
See www.dynamicmag.org for a Spanish translation of this article!
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