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Elections in El Salvador Invoke Rivalries of Civil War Years
Elisbet Malkin

El Salvador’s presidential election is only days away, and prime time television here is jammed with campaign commercials featuring snappy jingles, earnest endorsements — and President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

After 20 years in power, the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance, known as Arena, faces the first real challenge to its hold on the government from Mauricio Funes, a former television talk show host who is the candidate for the left-wing F.M.L.N. (Foto EDH)

The campaign has been vicious. Mr. Funes is popular after his years as a television journalist, so Arena does not attack him directly. Instead, it has linked the F.M.L.N., the party of El Salvador’s former guerrillas, to Latin America’s far-left leaders.

Images of Mr. Chávez appear during almost every commercial break in montages of grainy clips that also feature scenes of street chaos and camouflaged soldiers. The message is less than subtle: Elect Mr. Funes as president and the F.M.L.N. will “surrender” the country to the socialist camp.

The vitriol, analysts say, stems from El Salvador’s 12-year civil war, when the two parties were on opposite ends of the conflict. During the war, which ended in 1992, F.M.L.N. guerrillas fought the American-backed military, while Arena argued for a free hand in defeating them. To this day, the party anthem vows that the nation will be “the tomb where the Reds meet their end.”

“Arena and the F.M.L.N. were born in opposition to each other,” said Álvaro Artiga, a political scientist at the Central American University. “This is a re-edition of the conflict.”

The attack advertisements seem to be working. Mr. Funes, the left-wing candidate, began the campaign with a double-digit lead in polls, but he is now in a virtual tie in most of them with the Arena candidate, Rodrigo Ávila, the former chief of the country’s national police.

For his part, Mr. Funes contends that Arena is preparing to commit fraud on election day this Sunday by busing in voters from neighboring countries with fake voting cards.

José Antonio de Gabriel, the deputy chief of the European Union’s election observer mission, said the electoral system had enough safeguards against any large-scale attempt at fraud. But Arena’s broad support in the media, its spending advantage and the negative campaign have all contributed to what he called “the absence of a level playing field.”

There is a fear that a very close election could lead to unrest, even though both parties have abided by national and local election results before. “If the margin is small, it will be hard for the Frente to admit a loss,” said Roberto Rubio-Fabián, executive director of Funde, a research organization here, referring to the F.M.L.N. “There could be a group that says this is proof that the democratic way doesn’t work.”

After the civil war ended, the guerrillas demobilized and entered politics. The F.M.L.N. — officially the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front — won town halls and seats in the Legislative Assembly, but never the presidency.

“It has to be somebody like Funes,” said Leonel Gómez, a political analyst. “For the first time, you have somebody who’s electable. He doesn’t smell like a comandante.”

Mr. Funes’s bid has been helped by a general weariness with Arena’s two decades in power. The party was founded in 1981 by Roberto d’Aubuisson, who was accused of organizing death squads during the civil war.

El Salvador’s business elite has been the force, and the money, behind Arena, but social programs have helped it win four presidential elections. During his campaign, Mr. Ávila has given away new houses, inaugurated day care centers and posed for snapshots with applicants at job fairs.

Still, for a business-friendly government, Arena has a middling record. Average annual growth since 1999 has been below 3 percent, according to the Inter-American Development Bank, below the rates in most of the country’s neighbors. Over half of Salvadorans live in poverty, many of them in neighborhoods like La Chacra, to San Salvador’s east, with its small concrete houses, tin shacks, gang violence and drugs.

“In my 22 years, people have always complained about the same thing,” said Abraham Moisés Ticas, an unemployed mechanic. “They have been governing for such a long time, but there’s still no work.”

Still, there is a large minority in the neighborhood that is loyal to Arena, like Ana Dinora Pérez, 35. She ticked off the government programs that help her family get by on her husband’s salary as a bus driver: free medicine, toys and school supplies for her two children.

She fears that the F.M.L.N. could turn the country into Venezuela, where she mistakenly believes a war is taking place. “I want us to continue as we are, in peace,” she said.

Juan Héctor Vidal, a consultant to El Salvador’s main business association, said that growth was sacrificed to Arena’s emphasis on stability. In 2001, El Salvador adopted the dollar as its currency. “They dollarized the economy at the cost of employment and production — and of course social stability,” he said.

Critics argue that Arena is a party of crony capitalism that favors a few large business interests and does not allow competition. “Businessmen use the state to their economic advantage,” said Héctor Dada, a center-left politician advising Mr. Funes.

As the global recession hits, the government has fewer options. An estimated one-quarter of Salvadorans live in the United States, and the remittances they send back to support their families account for 18 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

Violent crime is growing, and the country’s legal system is unable to stop it. Both candidates promise a raft of programs to help the poor, and for all their angry diatribes, they sound alike when they talk about creating jobs, giving public pensions to the elderly and offering help for young people.

But Mr. Funes’s critics contend that he is merely a puppet of the former guerrillas who still hold power in the F.M.L.N., noting that his vice-presidential candidate, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, used to be a guerrilla commander. As evidence that Mr. Chávez is funneling money to the F.M.L.N. campaign, they point to a program in which Venezuela sells subsidized fuel to the party’s mayors.

In the campaign’s final days, Mr. Funes has racked up endorsements from centrists and promised to build bridges to the conservative business elite by emulating Brazil’s leftist president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “I have to make an effort to reduce their fears,” Mr. Funes said.

But many minds are already made up. “Arena has been a lover of liberty, of progress and free religion,” said Francisco Martínez, a spare parts salesman.

On the other side, Manuel Ortiz is just as fervent. He just lost his factory job. “The businessmen are fearful that change is coming,” he said. “They think that it will become like Venezuela and Cuba. But that’s a lie.”

Source The New York Times 11/3/2009

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