A reflection on the institutional crisis

The recent ups and downs of the institutional crisis beg the question: Isn’t it finally time to change the country’s current Constitution, drawn up in wartime to prevent future structural changes? The road to a new Constituent Assembly is very long but those who want to see more and greater changes clearly need a new legal framework to make them happen.

Elaine Freedman

El Salvador went through an “institutional crisis” between June and August over the makeup of the new Supreme Court of Justice. A third of its 15 members were due for election this year, always a conflictive event because, like all elections of high-level officials, many interests come into play. The novelty this time was that the Supreme Court itself, through its Constitutional Bench, took a lead role in the crisis by declaring the Legislative Assembly’s election of the five members this April 24 as well as the earlier election of another five in 2006 to be unconstitutional.

This unleashed the crisis and a power struggle between the Constitutional Bench and the majority of the different political parties’ legislative benches. On one side was the FMLN, allied with the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA); the National Concertation (CN), formerly called the National Conciliation Party; the Party of Hope (PES) formerly called the Christian Democratic Party and the organizations of the grassroots movement. On the other side was the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), with alliances outside the legislature: the National Association of Private Enterprise (ANEP) and the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development (FUSADES), both of which are heading up Allied for Democracy, a bloc of business associations, institutions and NGOs sharing ARENA’s ideology.

For the first time

The April election of justices took place amid a tussle between the FMLN and ARENA regarding those chosen, as had also happened with the election of the prosecutor general and the president of the Court of Accounts. The new National Assembly representatives elected on March 11 who were to take their seats on May 1 would slightly shift the legislative correlation in favor of ARENA, which won an additional seat to the 32 it had won in 2009, while the FMLN lost 4 of the 35 it won then. This explains both the FMLN’s haste to hold the Supreme Court elections before that date and ARENA’s categorical opposition to doing so. The FMLN was able to convince the legislative benches of GANA (11 seats), CN (7 seats) and PES (1 seat) to elect the new justices and their alternates. ARENA was isolated, supported only by the “neutral” position of Democratic Change’s one representative.

The vote included restructuring the Constitutional Bench, moving Belarmino Jaime to another bench, to break up the bloc of four justices (Jaime, Florentín Meléndez, Sidney Blanco and Rodolfo González) that had been handing down rulings of unconstitutionality on big decisions by the FMLN-led bloc. It also included appointing Ovidio Bonilla as presiding justice of both the Constitutional Bench and the Supreme Court as a whole. For the first time ever, the Supreme Court would be presided over by a judge with no ties to business power groups or any of their political parties.

One month and 10 days later, on June 5, the Constitutional Bench, whose bloc known as the “fantastic four” would be pulled apart by the legislative decision, declared it unconstitutional, using the same arguments ARENA had presented in its campaign to delay the election: the same Assembly cannot elect justices twice and this one already had its shot in 2009. In an unusual ruling, it also declared that the 2006 election of justices had been unconstitutional, but it allowed them to serve out their 9-year term while the 2012 elections would have to be repeated.

The Legislative Assembly—with the exception of ARENA and the CD—called the Constitutional Bench ruling rigged
and accused the bench of exceeding its purview by also giving legislators orders beyond the ruling. It turned to the Central American Court of Justice (CCJ) for help under Article 22, Sub-paragraph F of its Statute Agreement, which states amongst its functions “to hear and resolve cases at the request of the aggrieved in conflicts that may arise between the fundamental branches or bodies of government and when judicial decisions are not respected.”

The CCJ ultimately agreed that the justices elected in 2006 would remain in their posts but ruled that those elected on April 24 of this year would take office on June 15. In the interim prior to that that definitive ruling, a workers’ union filed suit questioning the 2009 election of justices Jaime and González, claiming that the process had been manipulated for them to be elected without the necessary endorsements. Of course, the Constitutional Bench, presided over by one of the accused, rejected the suit. The 4-party bloc of the FMLN, GANA, CN and PES subsequently created a legislative commission to investigate the case.

Unprecedented “White March”

With only three days to go before the inauguration of the new justices, the bloc of business associations did the unimaginable: Allied for Democracy called for a “White March” in support of the Constitutional Bench and against Ovidio Bonilla and the new justices taking office. They brought out approximately 10,000 people. The march was led by figures Salvadorans had never before seen on the streets, including ANEP executive director Arnoldo Jiménez and Chamber of Commerce and Industry president Luis Cardenal. They were accompanied by ARENA mayors Milagros Navas, Juana de Pacas and Salvador Ruanos. Meanwhile, Juan José Daboub, a World Bank official and brother of ANEP board chairman Jorge Daboub, lobbied the US Congress to suspend the Millennium II Fund as well as all other aid to El Salvador.

The rightwing march riled the FMLN and the grassroots movement and on inauguration day, July 16, they responded with an even larger demonstration. They mobilized about 25,000 people who accompanied the inauguration from outside the Court’s premises while the Court unions, who had occupied the building for the previous three days, did so from within.

Two presidents in
the Supreme Court

In that setting, two men declared themselves president of the Supreme Court just before sunset on July 16: the newly sworn-in Ovidio Bonilla and Florentín Meléndez, appointed by the Legislative Assembly in 2009 as Jaime’s alternate during his absences. This duality went on for a month. The media called Meléndez “president” and Bonilla “the lawyer usurper,” creating a fictitious reality for public consumption.

During this time it was learned that Rodolfo González had lied about his clean criminal record in the 2009 selection process, hiding information about a prior conviction for domestic violence. A communications war was launched and social organizations from both right and left put forth their arguments in favor of one side or the other daily, while the two conflicting parties mutually accused each other of attempting a technical coup.

80 hours of negotiation

A week later a negotiating table was instituted, chaired by President Funes and made up of representatives of the different political parties. The tough 17-round negotiation lasted over 80 hours before finally reaching an agreement that left the “fantastic four” on the Constitutional Bench in exchange for granting the presidency of both their bench and the Supreme Court to José Salomón Padilla, a highly experienced labor defense lawyer and self-proclaimed FMLN collaborator.

The media called the events “a clash between the Assembly and the Court,” once again hoisting the banners of “separation of powers” and “defense of the Constitution.” Historically, any time the ruling class has felt its status quo threatened, it has invoked the need to preserve “democracy” through this foolproof recipe. It was logical that this issue should reappear at this juncture, when its political hegemony had lost ground.

Separation of powers:
The protective shield

Although rooted in pre-modernity and later in the 17th-century English Constitutional Monarchy model, separation of powers is a principle of government that really dates back to the European Age of Reason.

The 18th-century Enlightenment thinkers were a progressive group from the emerging bourgeoisie and a sector of the nobility that identified with them. Geographically centered in France, their ideas threatened the philosophical foundations of feudalism, opening the way to the founding of the bourgeois State. Forty one years before the French Revolution, Montesquieu presented the separation of powers concept as the basis for democracy in his book On the Spirit of Laws. He reasoned from an everyday bourgeois perspective and its “founding principles,” beginning by viewing human beings as individualistic and competitive and concluding that the State exists for the purpose of protecting citizens from each other.

Prioritizing their desire that their rights to life, integrity, freedom and, above all, private property not be affected, men granted the State power to protect them. But, who would protect them from the State? Montesquieu’s answer was that the same political system could ensure such protection through a separation of powers. By dividing the State into different bodies, and distributing its functions between them, it would create a system of checks and balances that would ensure a clean exercise of political power.

Three inseparable branches
of economic power

The “separation of powers” and “rule of law” constituted political progress in that they saw to the political burial of feudalism and allowed the bourgeoisie to build their own “rules of the game,” just as kings and feudal lords had done previously in their absolute monarchies.

Over the ensuing 264 years these concepts have become so indisputable that they seem as “God-given” as the “divine right” that the Age of Reason thinkers philosophically defeated. They are unconditionally embraced as the cornerstone of democracy: neither logic nor history is used any more to underpin their current value. Separation of powers is defended to the hilt without questioning what’s really beneath the robes; it’s used to distinguish between good and bad, with “good” respecting the concept and “bad” questioning or doubting its supremacy.

The unconditional defense of separating the branches of government conveniently obviates the key to grasping politics in countries like El Salvador. No realistic analysis is made of the power relationships between these three branches and the economic power groups.

Historically the main obstacle to political democracy in El Salvador hasn’t been a lack of independence among the three branches of government, but rather the total and absolute dependence of each branch on the ruling class. This sn’t accidental or based on the personality of this or that politician, although there have been individuals who strengthened it more than others and historic moments when it was imposed more clearly than at others. It’s an organic dependence expressed in the structure of government, its institutions, its legal rules and its functions. This historical relationship doesn’t just involve the Salvadoran ruling class but also the international ruling class as personified in its 20th- and even 21st-century star player: the US government.

A little history

El Salvador has had 16 Constitutions since 1823. The first, obviously, founded it as an independent State. The next three fluctuated between being Constitutions of the Republic and Constitution of the Central American Federation, until history showed that the region’s future would be to fragment into “little republics.” As Salvadoran revolutionary poet Roque Dalton said, “The idea of the country’s real dependence underlay the hype around formal independence.” Salvadoran politics still revolved around the international indigo market.

Although several legislatures in the ensuing period introduced one change or another, the Constitution that best cemented the change from one era to the next was that of 1886, under the leadership of President General Francisco Menéndez. Capitalism had been born in El Salvador and the original capital accumulation, mainly from growing coffee, lacked a legal framework to support it. Five years earlier, the Law of Extinction of Communities had facilitated the dismantling of indigenous and peasant communal lands. Soon afterwards, the Law of Extinction of Ejidos (communal
or indigenous lands) expanded and buttressed the process of dividing up land, allowing it to be transferred to creole [Salvadoran-born Spanish] individuals and families.

There was still a final blow to come. Historian Flores Macal tells us that by 1886 a few families—the Alfaros, Palomos, Dueñases, Regalados, Escalóns and Meléndezes—had taken over 40% of the national land to expand the agro-export sector, mostly on former community and communally owned lands. The 28 legislative representatives at the time, several of them members of these landowning families, legalized land privatization and the agro-export model as a national development strategy and incorporated liberalism’s own principles and modalities so as to keep up with the constitutionalist debate of the European capitalist countries on which they still depended in those years.

The 1886 Constitution lasted until 1950

The 1886 Constitution effectively met the ruling class’ needs. There was only a brief break in 1939, when General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez made a constitutional change to enable him to stay in power. When he fell, the 1886 Constitution was readopted and it worked until 1950 when, once again, it became necessary to change the legal framework to consolidate a new era of capital accumulation.

These were the post-World War II years. The international coffee market was booming, which allowed the oligarchy to experiment with new ways of accumulating capital.

In Central America, the era of “absolute” dictatorships had lost its luster and a group of young military officers—many trained in the US—backed the Salvadoran oligarchy’s “modernizing” group in a coup that dislodged General Salvador Castaneda Castro and delivered a crushing blow to the oligarchy’s most conservative group, which was resisting the diversification of the country’s economic base. Really, they had nothing to fear: industrialization didn’t come to change production’s social relationships but to consolidate them. The exploiters were still the same coffee-growing families; they redirected their investments into industry without abandoning agro-exportation and the new industrial workers were the agricultural workers who had migrated to the capital.

Days after the coup the new Revolutionary Council of Government declared that, while recognizing the “virtues” of the 1886 political Constitution, “the country’s development requires a Constitution suited to the new political, social and economic conditions unfolding in national life.”

Authoritarian but with
a democratic facade

This period coincided with an economic boom in the United States, reinvigorated after the Depression that preceded World War II. The US ruling class had already saturated the domestic market and, in order to continue developing, needed to export capital beyond its borders. Part of the Salvadoran State’s new role was to “attract foreign investment” with offers that included attractive benefits for the investors.

The industrialization model required a more proactive government role in economic activities. The new Constitution needed to establish government bodies that would bolster the industrialization process. At the same time, the advance of the democratic revolution in Guatemala, as well as the Cold War’s nascent anti-communist fever, presaged the need for some kind of opening—whether real or propagandistic—that would help “contain communism.”

The 1950 Constitution responded to the contradictory needs of the time. It established governmental bodies that would make new public infrastructure investments to open up a domestic market for various industrial products. And it put forward a modernizing but always liberal discourse introducing the “social welfare” concept into governmental language.

As the lawyer José María Méndez explains: “The model we still use today is defined in it, with some significant modifications. Real power, which is economic power, determines the existence of a governing party with a majority in the Assembly. At that time it was the Revolutionary Party of Democratic Unification. Having a majority in the Assembly guaranteed that it could appoint whoever it wanted in the second-tier elections. And there was always an opposition party—then the Renovating Action Party—which had too few votes to stonewall the majority party.” This is how an authoritarian system with a democratic facade was ensured.

1983: A counterinsurgency Constitution

In 1982, the Pact of Apaneca, promoted by the military and the US embassy, unified the conservative oligarchy—represented by the newlyy formed ARENA, the already weakened PCN and the “modernizing” bourgeoisie and allied sectors such as the petty bourgeoisie represented by the Christian Democratic Party—to deal with the threat of the revolutionary forces grouped together in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). In addition to appointing Álvaro Magaña as President, it agreed on a National Constituent Assembly for 1983. This Assembly, presided over
by ARENA founder Roberto D’Aubuisson, put a counterinsurgency stamp on the new Constitution while maintaining and deepening the “humanist” language that guaranteed continuity of the contradiction.

Article 85 of the Constitution established that political parties “are the only instrument for the exercise of public representation within Government,” thus vetoing the constitutional validity of the FMLN coming to power, given that it wasn’t a political party at that time. Article 105 frustrated the second phase of the Agrarian Reform. According to the 1980 Agrarian Reform Law, that second phase would have affected properties of 100 to 500 hectares. Article 105 raised the lower limit to 245 hectares, establishing that lands exceeding this amount would be expropriated by law in the next three years and transferred to landless peasant families. This virtual postponement gave the large landowners—who were still well represented in the Legislative Assembly—time to divide up their properties and distribute them among family members or sell them. The announced expropriations never happened.

The entrenched articles

The 1983 Constitution also established certain entrenched articles, which can’t be modified under any circumstances. According to article 248, entrenched articles are those “relating to the form and system of government, the Republic’s territory and alternating terms of the presidential office of the Republic.” Anticipating the possibility of an FMLN victory in the eighties, the ruling class closed the door on any possible FMLN victory in the eighties by defining it as a change in “the form and system of government,” thus constitutionally prohibiting revolution. Although some important constitutional reforms were made with the 1992 Peace Accords, the system’s structural framework remained intact.

All this background information helps clarify several aspects of a situation that lawyers, academics and politicians have convinced us is “too complicated to be understood.” A series of widespread malicious explanations and distorted fallacies have helped mislead public opinion.

Fallacy Number 1:
Legal is not political

The first explanation to be discarded is that this crisis is a legal not a political problem; that dealing politically with issues as eminently legal as those concerning the Republic’s Constitution involves corrupting them. This has been the core argument of the five Constitutional Bench members, especially the “fantastic four,” ARENA and Allied for Democracy.

The Central American University said that describing it as a political problem is “so vague and unfounded that no one knows what it means, because sometimes political solutions in this country have been exemplary while at other times corrupt.” This position invokes the famous “legal dogma,” which ends by clarifying that laws are one thing and politics quite another. But this assertion is quickly washed out in the tides of history.

As Frederick Engels said in Anti-Duhring, “Our ideologist may turn and twist as he likes, but the historical reality that he casts out at the door comes in again at the window, and while he thinks he’s framing a doctrine of morals and law for all times and all worlds, he is in fact only fashioning an image of the conservative or revolutionary tendencies of his day—an image which is distorted because it has been torn from its real basis and, like a reflection in a concave mirror, is standing on its head.”

Positing that what legal is clean and political is dirty is to defend the indefensible in a country where the Supreme Court has been the protector par excellence of a very recalcitrant oligarchy’s interests. In recent years the Court has been responsible for decisions such as removing the power of the probity section to investigate irregularities in property statements. It has protected ARENA’s policies that threaten national sovereignty like the dollarization policy in force since 2001 and the presence of the US army’s drug-traffic monitoring base with diplomatic immunity for all staff. Lately it obstructed the prosecution of those responsible for the 1989 massacre of the Jesuit priests and their employees, denying a petition for the accused killers’ extradition to Spain.

Fallacy Number 2:
The Assembly versus the Court

It’s important to remember that the conflict began between ARENA and the FMLN, not between the Legislative Assembly
and the full Supreme Court. In its clever political move, the FMLN’s legislative bench exacerbated contradictions among rightwing parties and isolated ARENA. The GANA, PCN and PES votes, added to those of the FMLN, total 50: 7 more than are needed for a simple majority and 8 less than are needed for the qualified majority of 58 out of 84 votes.

There was no conflict between the FMLN-led bloc and the full Supreme Court. Nor did the Criminal Bench, the Civil Bench or the Administrative Disputes Bench have any problems with the Legislative Assembly or any of the political parties. Only the Constitutional Bench’s “fantastic four” spent time fighting with the legislative group (the Bench’s fifth member, Nelson Castaneda, was on his way out because his term was up).

Any doubts are cleared up by seeing the social forces that lined up on each side of the conflict. Allied for Democracy, social representative of the business class, was the first in line to defend “the four.” The Salvadoran public, not so interested in the case but very interested in the divisions and scandals, was astonished to see members of the oligarchy marching in the streets on July 12. This unprecedented example of “social struggle” championed by an elite that had never before been seen “on foot” presaged that something very important was at play for the ruling class. The Catholic Church also came out in favor of “the four” and against “politicians,” expressing the religious institution’s traditional cronyism with the ruling class. Daboub’s work in the United States, the support some members of Congress expressed for the Constitutional Bench justices plus the editorials in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal linking the FMLN legislative bloc’s position in the conflict to Hugo Chávez and Daniel Ortega left little room for confusion.

The FMLN was backed by such social organizations as the Salvadoran Union Front, the Association of War Wounded,
the October 12 Grassroots Resistance Movement, a number of women’s organizations, the Salvadoran Student Coordinating Body from the University of El Salvador and the National Unity for the Defense and Deepening of the Changes,
a multi-sector organization recently formed around the figure of Mauricio Funes and his Technical Secretariat. All of these organizations rejected ARENA’s conduct, questioned the validity of Rodolfo González’ election because of his history of domestic violence, called on Allied for Democracy not to destabilize the country but to support a negotiated solution mediated by the President.

Fallacy Number 3:
It’s a moral problem

When other explanations failed to find sufficient backing for the rightwing cause, the media tried to convince the public that it’s a “moral” problem. Salvador Samayoa, a former FMLN leader then ARENA government official during Francisco Flores’ administration, explained: “The four super-heroes of the Marvel Universe decided to use their powers to save the world. These four magistrates used their power to honor, demand, strengthen, rescue and perhaps save our democracy from ruinous degradation.”

On the other hand, the media took on the responsibility of putting out the line that “the FMLN is just like ARENA,” referring
to the haste to elect magistrates with a favorable correlation characteristic of ARENA’s legislative conduct in 2006 as similar to that of the FMLN in 2009.

According to this logic, the honor of the four justices is unquestionable, despite cases such as the quick ruling in favor of Colonel Sigfrido Ochoa Pérez, who was responsible for the El Calabozo massacre, so he could participate as an ARENA candidate in March 2009, while hundreds of cases that are priorities for the general public remain shelved because of a “shortage of time.” Also despite their negligence concerning Spain’s request to extradite those who murdered the Jesuit priests—not voting against the justices who refused but rather keeping silent so they could get away with it—and despite Rodolfo González’s lie in hiding his history of domestic violence.

A final surrealistic act

According to those who tout the moral explanation, implementing a political strategy that considers the correlation of forces and the possibility of pushing a political program in an unfavorable situation is immoral and dishonorable. The extent of that argument was seen in an incident that took place on the day Ovidio Bonilla was inaugurated as Supreme Court president. When Belarmino Jaime refused to hand over the office keys, Bonilla hired a locksmith to change the locks so he could access his workplace. According to the media, this made Bonilla a criminal and Florentín Meléndez filed suit against him with the Prosecutor General’s Office.

It’s surrealistic to describe Bonilla’s behavior as criminal and unethical in a country where it’s commonplace for murders to go unpunished and where organized crime protects itself using such important tools as bribing judges and the collaboration of prosecutors.

In this context, a moral discourse is hardly appropriate: the struggle between “good” and “evil” may be suitable for comic books but is inapplicable to our reality.

The crisis of oligarchic hegemony

The historical tradition of the oligarchy wielding absolute control over the three branches of government—executive, legislative and judicial—was broken in El Salvador in 2009. In the elections in January of that year, the FMLN won 35 of the 84 seats in the Legislative Assembly, more than in any previous election. While this didn’t guarantee it the qualified majority of 56 votes or even a simple majority of 43 votes over the combined rightwing parties, it was a significant step forward, later deepened to fracture the unity of the Salvadoran Right. In those same elections ARENA won 32 seats but lost 13 of them
in October that same year when 13 of its representatives split with ARENA and moved to GANA, the newly formed rightwing option. ARENA was left with a legislative bench of just 19 representatives. Although it rallied in the legislative elections this past March, winning 33 seats to the FMLN’s 31, it’s still not enough to build back the rightwing bloc it formerly led to control the legislature.

Two months after that electoral shift in the legislature, the presidential elections represented the worst political reversal in the history of the Right. On March 15, 2009, the FMLN, a party that openly defines itself in its statutes as “democratic, revolutionary and socialist,” won the presidential election. Although President Funes has moved far from those principles, he has patently broken with the palace tradition of unconditional loyalty to El Salvador’s oligarchs.

The Court was the Right’s last bastion

The Supreme Court was the Right’s last bastion of absolute control. But this is also being breached despite the fact that justices linked to the oligarchy were also elected this past April. The Court is no longer monochromatic.

For the first time ever, this body is being presided over by a man with no ties to the ruling class and—apparently disturbing
the elite even more—the FMLN has truly or symbolically taken down the “fantastic four.” Everything indicates that the business class had achieved a kind of symbiosis with the members of the Constitutional Bench over the last three years. Obviously, some thrashing about was to be expected from those drowning and that led to the “institutional crisis.”
The transition couldn’t take place without significant resistance because the Supreme Court is an important force backing impunity.

The resistance resonates because the Salvadoran oligarchy’s economic hegemony remains intact even if it has lost some hegemony in the political arena. In the end, the negotiation resulted in a balanced correlation of power, with no one coming out the clear victor. The oligarchy’s “fantastic four” kept their bloc and with it an unbreakable majority. In exchange they had to give up the presidency of the Court, which was put into the hands of a man who says he’s at the service of the working class.

Another Constitution
for the Republic?

The intrigues that lay behind so much real or alleged unconstitutional behavior pose another fundamental question: Isn’t it time to change the Constitution, which was drawn up in wartime to hold in check any possibility of achieving structural changes in Salvadoran society?

If Constitutions are the institutional legal frameworks of a State that, as Roberto Turcios says, “effectively condenses the logic of the economic, political, military and ideological power within a defined territory,” can we conclude that this logic has now reached a turning point and that the fledgling changes in society’s relationships warrant drafting a new Constitution to give them greater strength?

There’s a legal obstacle: the members of the 1983 Constitutional Bench threw a spanner into the works with Article 248, which prohibits modifying the form or system of government. This invalidates the legal possibility of having a National Constituent Assembly, because no constitutional mechanism enables it to be convened. Ricardo Iglesias, lawyer and adviser to the FMLN legislative bench, thinks he might have found a solution. “According to Article 248 the form and system of government can’t be modified, but nothing says we can’t reform Article 248…ways can be found.”

A National Constituent Assembly could open the way to revising El Salvador’s current institutional structure, as well as the periodicity of elections, which ties us into perpetual political campaigning. It could more wholeheartedly recognize the national and international advances made in the field of human rights and could even recover the State’s lost ground in controlling the country’s natural resources and regulating strategic economic investments.

The road will be long

The road to a Constituent Assembly is decidedly a long one. Last year the FMLN proposed introducing the concept of a referendum into the Constitution and ARENA, ANEP and their political analysts reacted virulently. One ANEP communiqué was titled “FMLN proposes a lethal attack on democracy.” Former FMLN activist Paolo Lüers, now an entrepreneur and columnist for El Diario de Hoy, wrote a public letter to this newspaper addressed to Norma Guevara, head of the FMLN’s legislative bench, seeking clarification about the reference to the creation of a Constituent Assembly. He said his understanding was that the FMLN is seeking “direct democracy in which independence and the separation of powers is lost.”

The FMLN may have to go further in making changes in the social, political and economic relationships before the country can translate them into a new Constitution. The grassroots sectors may need a better correlation of forces in order to ensure that a Constituent National Assembly would sufficiently represent their interests. What is not at all in doubt is that the sectors that are demanding more and greater changes in the country need a legal framework to open up real arenas in which to implement profound transformations.

Elaine Freedman is a grassroots educator and envío correspondent in El Salvador.

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