Hombres de Negocio en Washington ven una promesa en Funes

Hace unas semanas Mauricio Funes, candidato a la Presidencia de la República de El Salvador por el FMLN, llegó a Washington, DC., bien trajeado, a convencer a la comunidad salvadoreña residente ahí, especialmente la empresarial, de que él es el hombre más capaz para timonear el país y sacarlo, según él, del atolladero actual en el que se encuentra y llevarlo por una ruta económica y socialmente menos dolorosa que por donde ha venido transitando estas últimas dos décadas.

Ahí en la capital de Estados Unidos lo recibió gente que había llegado hasta de San Francisco. El empresario Luis Reyes, dueño de dos restaurantes emblemáticos en el área metropolitana de Washington, actuó de anfitrión.

Poco se dijo del apoyo empresarial que tuvo la visita de Funes a Washington en los medios salvadoreños. Ahí la noticia de portada seguía siendo la conexión entre el FMLN y las FARC, y sigue todavía, apareciendo hasta en la sopa. Cosas que marcan la prioridad de los medios. Nada en contra de la Democracia, sí de los principios periodísticos y de la información balanceada que deben de regir en los medios.

Al final Mauricio Funes, terminó tomándose unas cervecitas frías con los anfitriones empresarios delante de una pantalla gigante por donde se miraba un partido de fútbol de la selección salvadoreña.

A la izquierda, tenía a un tal Jaime, mejor conocido como “la Chelona Rodríguez”, el hombre de aquella melena larga y sedosa que se echó, con el otro monstruo de la época, Jorge Mágico González, el país encima de sus espaldas y lo puso junto con las 24 selecciones mejores del mundo en aquel inolvidable Mundial España 82.

La Chelona se había desplazado expresa y exclusivamente desde San Salvador para asistir al encuentro. Curiosamente lucía un rojo llamativo. (Foto de Jorge O. Martinez,centrodeportivo.com: Mauricio Funes y Jaime Rodriguez)

Alguien que estuvo ahí comentó a esta redacción, que fue una noche distendida, donde se habló de negocios, de política y de fútbol, tres temas, un tanto machistas, hasta ahora dominados por el partido ARENA.

Con ustedes la noticia del Washington Post sobre el apoyo empresarial a Funes de la comunidad salvadoreña en el área de Washington.

Salvadorans See Promise in Candidate
By N.C. Aizenman and Alejandro Lazo*

For most of his life, Luis Reyes has had a dread of public speaking and a distrust of left-wing politicians from his native El Salvador. (Foto: salvadoran restaurant owner Luis Reyes)

Yet on a recent evening, the 48-year-old restaurant owner stepped nervously to a microphone in front of more than a hundred Salvadorans under a party tent behind his Northwest Washington home to introduce the new head of the leftist former guerrilla party, Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.

Looking on with a smile was the man responsible for Reyes's change of heart: Mauricio Funes, whose recent nomination as the FMLN's candidate for El Salvador's March 2009 presidential election represents the party's best chance of winning the top job since it laid down arms in 1992.

Funes, a former journalist whose nonviolent past and embrace of centrist economic policies distinguishes him from previous FMLN frontmen, has been polling as much as 21 points ahead of the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party's candidate.

He is also proving to be the catalyst for a notable political awakening among the sizable Salvadoran immigrant business community in the United States, including dozens of influential entrepreneurs and professionals in the Washington area, where an estimated 133,000 Salvadoran-born residents make up the region's largest immigrant group. The Salvadoran Embassy said that if U.S.-born children of Salvadoran citizens are counted, about 1.7 million Salvadorans, or 20 percent of that nation's population, live in the United States, with about 500,000 in the Washington region.

Although many local Salvadoran businesspeople travel to their homeland several times a year and raise substantial sums to support schools and churches in their home towns, many have steered clear of Salvadoran politics until now.

"There just wasn't a single candidate from either side that appealed to us," Reyes said.

Their dissatisfaction with the right often stems from their formative years in El Salvador. Despite their current wealth, many were born to impoverished farm workers, received little schooling and achieved success in the United States only after years of hard work.

Reyes, for example, co-owns two popular District restaurants, Lauriol Plaza and Cactus Cantina, and has stocked his spacious house with original paintings and elegant colonial-style furniture. He fled El Salvador's violence and poverty as a teenager and got his start as a dishwasher. As a result, Reyes said, he still identifies with El Salvador's poorest class, and he worries that the conservative ARENA party is dominated by wealthy elites who are not sufficiently concerned with social justice.

"They haven't done anything to improve the country," Reyes said. "It's because of them that so many Salvadorans are forced to leave the country every day to find work."

Those who come from regions of El Salvador hardest hit by the civil war between leftist guerrillas and the military-backed government during the 1980s also tend to mistrust ARENA's military roots.

Jorge Granados, 53, a real estate investor who was one of the guests at Reyes's home, recalled how, during the height of the war, several classmates at a university in San Salvador were kidnapped and murdered merely on suspicion of harboring leftist sympathies.

These Salvadorans' distaste for ARENA has only increased as the party's victory in four successive presidential elections has yielded limited economic and security gains. More than 30 percent of El Salvador's nearly 7 million people live in poverty, and the country has one of the highest per-capita homicide rates in the world.

Salvadorans living abroad send $3.7 billion a year to those living in El Salvador. And although the administration of President Elias Antonio Saca has tried to woo them by frequently visiting the Washington area and hosting international conferences for them, many of them also complain that they are not allowed enough input in government policy.

Salvadorans have lobbied unsuccessfully for the right to vote by absentee ballot and must return to El Salvador for elections.

Still, if their youthful experiences in El Salvador have made immigrant Salvadoran business owners leery of ARENA, their time in the United States has made them equally skeptical of the FMLN. Many have become stalwart defenders of the capitalist principles that enabled their businesses here to thrive. And they have long worried that the FMLN was hostile to foreign private investment, free trade and free markets.

So it was that during the presidential election of 2004, Reyes decided it was better not to vote at all than to cast a ballot for the FMLN's candidate, Schafik Handal, a former revolutionary.

"He wasn't pro-business; he was very radical," Reyes said. "He could have done bad things like nationalizing private businesses. His whole approach was just too leftist."

Funes, who gained fame as an independent, crusading television journalist and only officially joined the FMLN when it was about to select him as its candidate, arrives with none of that baggage.

Although he has pledged to pull Salvadoran troops out of Iraq and to improve ties with Washington's bete noire, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Funes has also taken pains to distance himself from previous FMLN positions. He has promised not to pull out of the Central American Free Trade Agreement with the United States or to reverse the Salvadoran government's decision to adopt the U.S. dollar as its currency.

"Funes represents an opportunity for significant sectors of the

Salvadoran community here to engage in a way they haven't felt able to before," said Geoff Thale of the Washington Office on Latin America. The implications, he added, could prove long-lasting. "I think what you're seeing is the emergence of the Salvadoran Diaspora in the United States as actors in both the political process here and in El Salvador itself."

Even as they cast their lot with Funes, many of these immigrants are making a point of distinguishing themselves from the FMLN. The organizers of the party at Reyes's house, for instance, call themselves simply "Friends of Mauricio," and the tables were decorated with white tablecloths and pink flowers instead of the red and black flags normally associated with FMLN events.

ARENA's candidate, former police chief Rodrigo Avila, meanwhile, has responded by shifting somewhat to the left -- for instance, modifying his party's mantra from "Peace, Progress, and Liberty" to "A More Just Country. Progress With Equity."

Both parties have long had committed representatives in this and other immigrant-filled communities who have reliably turned out hundreds of supporters at pre-election rallies. But Funes's new backers in the business and professional community could substantially bolster his fund-raising muscle.

Their public support may be most important to Funes because it could neutralize a repetition of ARENA's 2004 strategy, in which the party launched a media blitz warning that an FMLN victory would ruin relations with the United States. Many Salvadoran immigrants, terrified that this would jeopardize their immigration status and deprive their relatives of the money they send back home, urged family members to vote for Saca.

Funes's speech seemed directly pitched at calming such fears.

"Times have changed," he said. "The left is not afraid of business. And business does not need to be afraid of the left."

The crowd before him erupted in cheers.

Washington Post Staff Writers Saturday, June 21, 2008 Page B01

Newer Post Older Post