Available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format
The March presidential election in El Salvador, in which the conservative ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista) Party won its fourth consecutive victory in fifteen years, invites serious consideration and analysis. At a time when many governments in Latin America are being voted out of office by anti-establishment (and sometimes, anti-party) candidates, and attacks on "neo-liberalism" and globalization are increasingly the order of the day, El Salvador seems to be swimming strongly against the tide. What lies behind this anomaly?
Although one of the smallest countries in Latin America--roughly the size of Massachusetts--El Salvador has rarely been out of the news since 1979, when it was the site of one of the last engagements of the Cold War, as a Christian Democratic government with strong U.S. support was struggling to fend off an insurgency by forces backed by Cuba, Sandinista Nicaragua, and the Soviet bloc. Indeed, for a time U.S. military aid to the struggling Duarte administration (1984-1989) became one of the most important issues in American politics. Although the war concluded more than a decade ago--that is, roughly at the same time as the collapse of the Soviet Union and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua--it still inspires painful memories in El Salvador, and rightly so, since by some estimates it claimed as many as 70,000 lives out of a population of roughly 6 million people. Small wonder, too, that it continues to figure as the principal divide among the Salvadoran electorate.
Lost Opportunity for the Left
One would have thought by now that the country could move on. After all, the war in El Salvador ended in a reasonably hopeful way, with the former Marxist guerrillas of the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front (FMLN) acknowledging the fact that they could not defeat an elected government by force and accepting the challenge to fashion themselves as an ordinary political party. This it has accomplished with some success. In the municipal and legislative by-elections of 2003, for example, the party continued to win thirty-one out of eighty-four seats in the unicameral National Assembly, as well as seven of the fourteen departmental capitals, including the most populous cities, where their administrations have often won approval for good administration and honest government. More significantly still, the FMLN's Carlos Rivas Zamora was elected to the mayorship of San Salvador, the capital, the third consecutive time the party has captured this crucial constituency. All indications suggested that the presidency was but one election away.
Unfortunately the party bureaucracy chose to throw that opportunity out of the window by ceding control to its most hard-line factions, selecting as its candidate Schafik Handal. Seventy-three years of age, a former guerrilla chieftain, and an unreconstructed Communist, Handal ran a campaign that antagonized and frightened many Salvadorans, not all of them by any means wealthy or privileged. His rhetoric was strident and apocalyptic and his program far out of the mainstream. Specifically, he made it clear that if elected he would deliberately distance the country from the United States and draw closer to Cuba, China, Libya, and North Korea. He also promised to put an end to dollarization of the economy and renationalize state-owned companies recently sold to private investors. He pledged to withdraw the small but politically significant Salvadoran military contingent in Iraq.[1] More improbably, he promised free state education and health care to all, as well as guaranteed jobs to all university graduates. In spite of a record turnout of 69 percent of eligible voters, Handal managed to attract only 37 percent (compared to 57 percent for his ARENA opponent).
ARENA Builds on Its Success
The ARENA story is a study in contrasts. Although frequently described in the U.S. and foreign press as "right-wing," presumably dominated by wealthy bankers and businessmen when not indeed tied to "death squads," ARENA has in fact experienced a remarkable renovation over the last decade and a half. It is the only conservative party in Central America, and indeed one of the few in Latin America, with a genuinely popular base, representation throughout the national territory, and a vibrant youth movement. Though it has never had a clear majority in the National Assembly, it is still the largest single force represented there. It is also a party that has shown itself to be consistently open to new talent. Outgoing president Francisco Flores, a former academic with no previous political experience, was elected at age thirty-nine. His successor, Elías Antonio ("Tony") Saca, is a former sportscaster who, on June 1, will assume office just short of his fortieth birthday. More significantly, Saca comes from one of Salvador's immigrant families of Palestinian origins.[2] He was forced to quit school and go to work at a radio station at age fourteen, when his father's cotton business went broke. He eventually became the owner of several stations in his own right.
In contrast to Handal, Saca is a firm defender of El Salvador's integration into the global economy. During the campaign he proposed an ambitious trade policy whose cornerstone is integration into the Central American Free Trade Area (CAFTA) with the United States--an agreement now signed and awaiting ratification by our Congress and the regional parliaments. Saca expects CAFTA to generate 180,000 additional jobs in his country over the next ten years. He also advocates similar agreements with Canada, the European Union, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea. In a broader political and diplomatic sense, he made it clear that El Salvador would continue to align itself with the United States, which is now home to one out of four Salvadorans.
Saca also had the advantage of running on a reasonably sound, if not brilliant, economic record established by his predecessors. Substitution of the local currency for the U.S. dollar in 2001 led to three-fold drop in local interest rates and also helped the government place more bonds abroad (though it made traditional exports like coffee, sugar, and shrimp less competitive than those of Costa Rica and Honduras, whose currencies have depreciated). Foreign direct investment, most of it in assembly (maquila) industries, amounted to $317 million in 2002, a 14-percent increase over the previous year. Although El Salvador is still a country with wide gaps between the rich and poor, over the past fifteen years the indices of poverty, infant mortality, and unemployment have been steadily dropping. As Carlos Alberto Montaner pointed out in the Miami Herald (March 30), during every day of the Flores administration 106 homes, three schools, one kilometer of highway, and one health center were built.
The hidden financial advantage that has accrued to all Salvadoran governments for the past twenty years has been the existence of a large and growing diaspora in the United States remitting slightly more than two billion dollars a year to its homeland. This figure--spectacular by Central American standards--represents 15 percent of GDP and covers 90 percent of the country's trade deficit. It probably makes it easier (together with dollarization) for the government to place $1.25 billion of debt paper in foreign bond markets. Remittances have also funded an explosion of micro-enterprises such as garages, repair shops, and various cottage industries for which local bank credits would normally be unavailable, thus creating a burgeoning small-business class, which naturally has no appetite for wild-eyed social experimentation.
The crucial importance of remittances was underscored during the election campaign, during which ARENA television commercials claimed that, if Handal were elected, there would be a massive expulsion from the United States of undocumented Salvadorans, sometimes estimated to amount to 200,000 persons. This message was underscored by some highly undiplomatic remarks by two visiting congressmen from the United States and elliptic comments by a major Bush administration official. In fact, however, the impact of such threats was probably marginal to the final result; Salvadorans rich and poor are strongly oriented toward the United States in a variety of ways, and Handal's hostility to Washington and all its works cannot have worked to his political advantage.
Needed: Truly Competitive Politics
If Salvadoran democracy is to grow and flourish, at some point ARENA must eventually cede power at the national level to an alternative; otherwise it may fall into to what political scientists often call the "Mexican temptation"--institutional one-party rule, and with it, increasing corruption and political alienation. Unfortunately there seems no such prospect in the near future; the other parties, including the Christian Democrats, who ruled the country in the mid-1980s, together scored less than 6 percent this time around.
The most promising prospect would be a renovated FMLN, following the pattern of the Chilean Socialist Party, which after a long flirtation with Marxism has embraced democratic institutions, free markets, and open trade, while not abandoning its commitment to a more socially integrated society. Young leaders within the FLMN known as los renovadores are pushing hard for a generational change. One is Dr. Héctor Silva, former mayor of San Salvador. Another is Oscar Ortiz, the mayor of Santa Tecla, the capital of La Libertad and one of the most populous cities of San Salvador's greater metropolitan area. The party's many electoral victories to date attest that this overhaul is well underway, but the party's choice of presidential candidate this time around also reveals that the turnaround is clearly not complete.
A similar movement is afoot in neighboring Nicaragua, where renovating forces are attempting to detach former president Daniel Ortega from his ironclad control of the Sandinista Party. The problem for the Left in both countries is roughly similar. To the extent that they make each national election a referendum on civil wars they have lost, or wave the tattered banners of an extinct social and political system, they are handing conservative forces a victory that they may not invariably deserve.
Notes
1. Handal also stated somewhat gratuitously that he would move the Salvadoran Embassy in Israel from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv; El Salvador and Costa Rica are the only two countries in the world that maintain an embassy in Jerusalem.
2. Ironically, Schafik Handal has a similar background, and the two men come from the same city in El Salvador. Their families were part of a close-knit Arab community.
Mark Falcoff is a resident scholar at AEI.
