Thirteen years of joint Venezuela-El Salvador history

Venezuela’s Right and El Salvador’s Right have publicly acknowledged links. There are also obvious links between the FMLN and the Bolivarian Revolution. Hugo Chávez’s solidarity with El Salvador was indisputable; and has even created endearment between their two peoples.

Elaine Freedman

On March 5, at 3 pm local time in El Salvador, we received the news that Latin American leader Hugo Chávez had succumbed to cancer. Four days later Venezuela’s National Electoral Council called new presidential elections for April 14. After a lightning nine-day campaign, acting-President Nicolás Maduro won those elections by a very narrow margin. His opponents’ rejection of the electoral results unleashed a violent protest campaign in Venezuela that left 9 dead and more than 60 injured, with 12 health centers affected by incendiary attacks. While the National Electoral Council promised an electronic audit of the results, it sealed the electoral result on April 19 with Maduro’s inauguration, thus initiating a new chapter of the Bolivarian Revolution. Not one of those 43 days passed without the Salvadoran media highlighting the events taking place in Venezuela. What links exist between these two countries that led the Salvadoran people to experience the Venezuelan drama as their own?

2001: Comasagua receives Venezuelan solidarity

In January and February 2001, El Salvador suffered three massive earthquakes. One particularly affected area was Comasagua, in the department of La Libertad, one of El Salvador’s 30 poorest municipalities. Five Venezuelan Super Puma helicopters and one cargo ship immediately brought heavy machinery, tents and huge amounts of food and medicines specifically for Comasagua.

Two hundred officers and soldiers of the Bolivarian Armed Forces built a 117-unit housing complex there, which was named Colonia Venezuela. The contingent also rebuilt the Catholic church, two evangelical ones, the health unit and the school. Its medical and paramedical personnel treated the sick and injured. It was the first incursion of Venezuelan solidarity in El Salvador and left a trail of gratitude.

2002: Francisco Flores
supports the coup alone

Two days short of 14 months after the earthquake’s destruction of Comasagua, Venezuela suffered its own earthquake, this one political. On April 11, 2002, the Right attempted a coup against President Chávez. Pedro Carmona, then head of Venezuela’s Federation of Chambers and Associations of Commerce and Production, initiated the move by organizing a demonstration against the constitutional government, and its outcome involved kidnapping Chávez. Taking on the role of de-facto President, Carmona abolished all public branches of government including the parliament, eliminated 49 laws passed by Chávez and both displaced and ordered the detention of Chávez’s main government officials, including governors, mayors and Municipal Council members. The state television channel was closed.

In those same days, Costa Rica was hosting the 16th summit of heads of State and government of the Río Group, a spin-off from the Contadora Group created in the eighties to promote an end to the armed conflicts in Central America. As Carmona took power in Caracas, 19 of the American States attending that summit issued a joint communiqué publicly condemning the break with the constitutional order in Venezuela.

The only dissenting voice was that of Francisco Flores, El Salvador’s President at the time. He stunned the others when he declared that “our government is going to give the Venezuelan people and the transition government a vote of confidence. We will place our confidence in the new Venezuelan leadership.” In so doing, Flores showed himself even more complacent with the coup-makers than then-President George W. Bush, who issued a joint statement with Spain’s President José María Aznar expressing their desire that the “exceptional situation Venezuela is experiencing leads in the shortest possible time to full democratic normalization,” although they fell short of recognizing that “exceptional situation” as an alteration of democracy. El Salvador’s was the only government to instantantly endorse Carmona’s illegal and illegitimate government.

Flores had called the fact that Bush considered him a “his friend” the greatest honor in his life and bragged that Bush had called him “a brilliant young man.” But it would appear that his mentor left him “twisting in the wind” alone.

Bush-Flores: A “favor to a friend”

On March 5, CIA agents in Venezuela had reported to their superiors that, despite growing opposition to President Chávez, it would be hard to organize a coup because of divisions among the opposition forces. Immediately afterward, Venezuela’s rightwing unions, business sector and Catholic Church hierarchy presented their “Basls for a democratic agreement” to “guide us during the transition and to establish a Government of Democratic Unity.” It was the sign to the United States that the main impediment to the coup had been surmounted and that D Day would be soon.

On March 24, only three weeks before the coup, Bush made a lightning trip to in San Salvador. Declarations by US National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice indicated that the only agenda point was to take advantage of a summit meeting of the Central American Presidents to promote the signing of the free trade agreement between their countries and his. But considering this chronology, it is not out of line to suspect another, more private agenda point for Bush’s visit: to ask Flores the personal favor of publicly recognizing and supporting Carmona’s imposed and, as it turned out, very short-lived rule.

No apologies

Chávez was back in Miraflores in less than 48 hours. Loyal military forces and the Venezuelan people immediately swung into action to guarantee his return. The Bolivarian revolution would continue under Chávez’s command.

Within days, Salvadoran Deputy Foreign Minister Héctor Dada Sánchez claimed that the Flores government had never offered its vote of confidence to the coup-makers, that it had all been a misunderstanding. The support expressed was for the Venezuelan people, given that “El Salvador’s role is not to legitimize or delegitimize any government. El Salvador has neither that faculty nor that desire.” By that time both Spain and the United States had also decided to condemn the unsuccessful coup.

El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly representatives demanded explanations from Foreign Minister María Eugenia Brizuela while Manuel Melgar, deputy chief of the FMLN parliamentary bench, called on the Assembly plenary to recommend that President Flores apologize to the Chávez government. Flores declared that he wouldn’t consider apologizing, arguing that “El Salvador had a different position than the other governments that issued an opinion on the Venezuelan situation because it is in a different position.” Days later, Venezuelan Rear Admiral Carlos Molina Tamayo, one of the coup’s main protagonists, was welcomed in El Salvador as a political exile.

2005: No to Flores
in the OAS battle

Three years later, Flores’ presidential successor Elías Antonio Saca—like Flores, of the National Republican Alliance (ARENA) Party—proposed him as secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS). The idea received the express support of President Bush and US representative to the OAS John Maisto.

The FSLN bench in the Central American Parliament headed up the opposition to Flores’ candidacy, arguing that Flores lacked credibility due to his involvement in acts of corruption and his servile behavior toward the US, reflected in his participation in the war against Iraq and his support for the attempted coup against Chávez. Venezuela’s representative to the OAS, Jorge Valero, also expressed concern over Flores’ candidacy. “It would be undesirable to favor a President who supports coups.” The battle went on for several months, until Flores was pressured to withdraw when it became obvious he would be defeated by stronger South American candidates.

Terrorism finds a
home in El Salvador

The arrest of Salvadoran Francisco Chávez Abarca in the Caracas airport in July 2010, carrying a false Guatemalan passport, helped reveal the complex relationship between the CIA, Miami-based Cubans, the Venezuelan opposition and the Salvadoran Right.

Chávez Abarca, later tried in Cuba, declared that the purpose of his trip to Venezuela two months before its 2010 presidential elections was to undertake destabilization activities that would “stop President Chávez of Venezuela becoming President again or remaining in the presidency, especially because Venezuela has a sisterhood with Cuba, which isn’t in the interests of Miami’s Cuban Americans.”

His declarations also tied up many loose ends about the role of ARENA leaders and functionaries in these activities. The participation of former President Flores and Mario Acosta Oertel, Hugo Barrera, Rodrigo Ávila and Mauricio Sandoval—all long-time top-level members of ARENA with various nefarious elements in their dossiers—was confirmed, as was that of Spanish businessman Ramón Sanfeliú, owner of Talleres Moldtrok and MeCom in San Salvador.

2009: Plans to
assassinate Chávez

Information was also revealed about plans to assassinate President Chávez should he travel to El Salvador for President Mauricio Funes’ inauguration. The July 7, 2010, issue of Diario CoLatino, reported the involvement of El Salvador’s Association of Military Veterans (ASVEM) and of Fernando Palacios Luna, a Guatemalan prisoner serving time in the Zacatecoluca maximum security penal center for kidnapping crimes, who would carry out the hit.

The report specified that Roberto Monge Gallegos, head of an anti-Chávez group calling itself the Defenders of El Salvador Movement, went to the highway to Comalpa on June 1 to “receive Chávez,” arousing suspicions that he was also involved in the plot.

Posada Carriles
and his “second country”

At the time of his capture in Panama for plotting to kill Fidel Castro during the 10th Ibero-American Summit of 2001, Cuban-American terrorist Luis Posada Carriles told La Prensa Gráfica that El Salvador was like his second country. “I had friends there; I had affection, love, tenderness,” he repeated three years later. “It’s a country I love.” In the penultimate chapter of his 1994 book Los caminos del guerrero (The warrior’s paths), titled “My new work with the Venezuelans,” he tells of his activities in El Salvador with Venezuelan police agents who were training the recently created Civil National Police. Posada Carriles had lived in Venezuela for 17 years and was operations chief of that country’s Intelligence and Prevention Services Division (DISIP), an agency founded in 1969 that headed up and implemented the most important exterminations of the Venezuelan guerrilla movement.

These shameful chapters of El Salvador’s recent history are still inconclusive. Surely many more pieces are needed to complete the picture. But the relationship between the Salvadoran Right and the Venezuelan Right has been more than proven.

A united Left is important
to the birth of ALBA

Through two of its historical leaders, Shafick Handal and Nidia Díaz, the Salvadoran Left had a voice in the first discussions in 1993-94 about organizing a Latin American integration project as an alternative to the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), conceived by the Clinton administration and promoted by its successor. The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) was very much in favor of this common project from the outset, understanding that it would prepare the ground for the development of socialism in the continent, not just with respect to political alliances but also in the economic, cultural and social dimensions.

Nidia Díaz, a member of the FMLN’s Political Commission and one of that party’s legislative representatives, explained it this way: “For us it was important to be a unified Left at the level of parties and social forces through the São Paulo Forum and the governments. As different leftist parties were winning in Latin America, we were banking on a new alliance of governments based on principles of solidarity, sovereignty, complementarity, and development based on our countries’ endogenous resources and their preservation, as well as a type of trade that sought to surmount the asymmetries.

“There was a need to build the foundations of socialism and defend the sovereignty of each country. For the FMLN, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America, or ALBA, is now the most appropriate form of integration and union of peoples for building revolutions and developing socialism.”

2004: Petrocaribe and
counterpart municipal governments

In 2004 the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela invited the Saca government to join Petrocaribe. When the Right said no, the FMLN governments of various municipalities plus the Democratic Change government in Acajutla, department of Sonsonate, contacted Venezuela to say that that since the national government didn’t accept, they would like to form a public inter-municipal business to jointly manage the Petrocaribe project.

“We sent a delegation to Venezuela and they advised us to study our laws and said they would study theirs to see if the idea was legally feasible,” recalls Carlos Ruiz, former mayor of Soyapango and now secretary director of ALBA Petróleos. “They decided that there would be no legal problem in their country while we concluded that Salvadoran legislation gave us the faculty to assume a project of that nature.” It was a novel case for Venezuela, given that all its other energy cooperation agreements at that time were with central governments, although FSLN mayors in Nicaragua soon followed suit, and for the same reason.

That group of municipalities consolidated over the course of a year and subsequently signed a letter of understanding with President Chávez, who gave the green light to form the Inter-Municipal Energy Association for El Salvador (ENEPASA). On April 5, 2006, ENEPASA signed an agreement with PDV Caribe, an affiliate of PDVSA, Venezuela’s state petroleum company, to set up ALBA Petróleos as a mixed company with the same payment conditions as Petrocaribe: 51% of the seed capital contributed by PDV Caribe and 49% by the municipal government partners in ENEPASA; 60% of the oil bill to be paid within 90 days of delivery at 2% interest and the rest in 23 years at 1% interest.

2009: Fifth International
is CELAC’s predecessor

When Chávez launched his proposal for a Fifth International in November 2009 to reinstitute the historical structure of the world organization of workers, the FMLN was one of the first leftist organizations to welcome his initiative.

A month later, in the FMLN’s 24th Ordinary Convention, its militancy voted to join this new International. According to Nidia Díaz, the initiative sought to “unite the world based on a socialist vision to unify criteria and seek actions that will contribute to peace, fight poverty with fairer economic models and respect democracies at moments in which the Right is joining forces to defend coups d´état such as occurred in Honduras.”

President Funes kept his distance from the decision to join the project, declaring publicly his disagreement with his own Vice President, Salvador Sánchez Ceren, and the party that had put them both in office. The Fifth International never came to fruition, given that the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CLACS in English but more commonly known as CELAC, its acronym in Spanish) emerged in the same period as a project with a greater integrationist scope. Nonetheless, it sealed the relations between the Salvadoran Left and the Venezuelan Left.

2012: ALBA Foods born
to reactivate the countryside

Today, seven years after the creation of ALBA Petróleos, it controls 35% of El Salvador’s fuels market, while other projects have grown out of the income from that business: ALBA Alimentos, Tu Financiera and ALBA Fertilizantes.

ALBA Alimentos (ALBA Foods) was born last year as an initiative to reactivate agriculture in El Salvador. The new company received US$90 million from the earnings of ALBA Petróleos to launch its operations. In its first year it supported approximately 20,000 small farmers to plant 21,000 hectares and cultivate more than 2 million quintals of maize, beans and rice.

Unlike traditional banks, ALBA Foods has promoters who seek out small farmers who should get access to credit. The only requirement for accessing it is minimum documentation and the signing of a loan agreement to receive both inputs and money for the planting.

Given the drought last year, 3,500 hectares were lost, corresponding to some US$3 million in credits, but ALBA Foods decided to write off the debt. It also buys the harvest at prices favorable to the peasant growers. If the market pays $13 per quintal, ALBA Foods buys it at $17 because it doesn’t resell to big companies but markets it directly at the national level, and can export any surplus to Venezuela. Those who benefit from ALBA Foods have undeniably been given a reprieve from the asphyxiating treatment of the traditional banking system.

2013: micro-credits,
study grants, fertilizers…

This year saw the birth of Tu Financiera (Your Financing Agency), a credit support project with low interest rates and minimum documentation requisites for small and micro-businesses. ALBA Becas (ALBA Study Grants) was also inaugurated, granting 3,400 scholarships to university students and graduating high school seniors.

ALBA Fertilizantes (ALBA Fertilizers) started with products imported from Venezuela, at the same time promoting organic inputs. It already has a plant in northern Chalatenango that produces bokashi, a fermented organic fertilizer recipe. According to Abel Lara, who heads the Salvadoran Confederation of Agrarian Reform Federations (CONFRAS), steps are now being taken to sign an agreement with BIOFAM of Cuba and set up a plant that produces other organic fertilizers and pesticides.

All this has forged a close relationship between the Salvadoran people benefited by the ALBA project and the Venezuelan people.

Two territories, two projects

Since its formation, ALBA has been the target of a campaign of discrediting, threats and sabotage by the Salvadoran Right. The president of the National Private Enterprise Association (ANEP), Juan José Daboub, explained to the daily El Mundo the reasoning behind these attacks: “ALBA is the means for implementing its 21st-century socialist model. It’s preferable to live in freedom in the countryside than in a golden cage.”

Daboub’s cynical words draw the line between two territories whose borders are political, economic and ideological rather than geographic, defining two opposed projects of society. One is based on the exploitation of “man by man” to generate wealth that will supposedly benefit all but in reality concentrates 43% of the world’s wealth in 1% of its population. The other is based on the collective generation of wealth to ensure the satisfaction of all of society’s material and spiritual needs.

As Ernesto Villegas, minister of Popular Power for Communication and Information, said 11 days before Venezuela’s April 14 elections, “Socialism and capitalism are two historical blocs currently personified in a son of Chávez [presidential candidate Nicolás Maduro] and a son of businessman Pedro Carmona Estanga [Henrique Capriles Radonski].” Along the same lines, Abel Lara of El Salvador’s CONFRAS called the elections “a struggle between US imperialism and the Venezuelan people.”

This doesn’t mean that the Bolivarian project is a theoretically pure model of socialism. It’s an effort to concretize a socialist proposal in specific historical, cultural, economic, geopolitical and environmental conditions. In this sense, the FMLN’s historical project, reflected in the declaration of its “democratic, revolutionary and socialist nature,” is comparable to Venezuela’s. Its current “good living” project is the path chosen to move toward constructing a socialist project in El Salvador’s particular conditions.

2013: Assassination charges

Given this background, few Salvadorans were surprised when Venezuelan Foreign Minister Elías Jaua charged that ARENA legislator Roberto D’Aubuisson, Jr.; ex-Colonel David Kox Arana, arrested for possession of war weapons in 2010; and Guillermo Cader Acuña, long-time ARENA leader in the department of Santa Ana, were heading up mercenary groups linked to Capriles Radonski’s Campaign Command with plans to sabotage the Venezuelan electrical system and assassinate Nicolás Maduro.

Days later, Mauricio Funes announced the opening of a police investigation into these charges. In an interview with Fox news chain, he specified that, if necessary, he would make the investigation judicial. Funes stated that Maduro is a serious person and therefore had reasons to make the charge, adding that Salvadoran rightwing groups and parties had a history of participating in actions to destabilize leftist and progressive governments in the region.

ARENA denied the accusations and dubbed Maduro “crazy” while D’Aubuisson flew to Venezuela to “clean his name and the name of El Salvador” in what he called a “Truth and Dignity Crusade.” Meanwhile, representatives of social organizations including the Foundation of Studies for the Application of Law (FESPAD) gathered in front of the Attorney General’s Office to file a request to look into the charge. But Abel Lara has since said that “based on the rigged election of Luis Antonio Martínez as the new attorney general, we don’t believe it’s going to be investigated.”

National mourning for Chávez followed by Maduro’s election

Chávez’s death consternated all the peoples of Latin America and the world, including the Salvadoran Left. Hours after learning the news on March 5, hundreds of activists of El Salvador’s social movement and the FMLN gathered in the Savior of the World Plaza to share their grief at his passing. Throughout the month Masses, gatherings and movie forums were held to pay homage to one of Latin America’s most relevant figures of our times.

The Legislative Assembly declared March 8 a day of national mourning. Not even the opposition of the ARENA bench, much
less the abstention of Rodolfo Parker, the Christian Democratic Party’s only representative, could quash this FMLN initiative. The legislative decree reads: “President Chávez was characterized as a fighter for democracy; in this quest he took up programs and projects in many Latin American countries.” President Funes attended the funeral services in Caracas’ Military Academy, his first visit to Venezuela since taking office in June 2009.

The Salvadoran men and women who went to Bolívar Park in the center of San Salvador on April 14 to follow the Telesur broadcast of the Venezuelan elections projected on a giant screen did so in festive spirit. Carlos Ruiz reflected the sentiments of those gathered there: “For El Salvador, as for all of Latin America and the world, the victory of the Bolivarian Revolution means the strengthening of Latin American unity, the development of its peoples and a boost to the transformations being developed.”

No one can deny it

No one can deny Venezuela’s solidarity with El Salvador, and everyone knew that this relationship was at stake in those elections. Marbel Membreño, artist of the Sierra Madre Group, told us that “Bolívar’s pro-independence process and the Venezuelan socialist process are related to the Salvadoran process of changes through the enormous solidarity from the Venezuelan people to this humble people.”

Despite all the Salvadoran Right’s campaigns to erode Venezuelan solidarity, disparaging it as “interventionist,” the country’s good image is so irrefutable that even ARENA’s presidential candidate for the 2014 elections, Norman Quijano, had to climb on board. Trying to milk the moment to recover from the drop in public opinion he has suffered in recent months, Quijano declared: “I’ve always been very interested in the issue of Petrocaribe. And we wouldn’t discard the idea of entering into direct government-to-government agreements on the particular question of Petrocaribe and seriously studying the topic.”

More credible were the words of Salvador Sánchez Ceren, currently Funes’ Vice President and the FMLN’s presidential candidate, when he declared at Maduro’s inauguration: “There is a commitment to deepen the relations and move them to an economic and social development sphere. We hope the relations between Venezuela and El Salvador are further strengthened by President Nicolás Maduro taking office.”

Some lessons for
El Salvador’s 2014 elections

The FMLN, which is heading for its own elections in nine months, pulled various lessons from the Venezuelan electoral process. In Nidia Díaz’s words, “The electoral results in Venezuela represent the contradictions, the class struggle being waged in that country. Any revolution produces a counterrevolution. There’s no such thing as an ideal reality in which ‘everything is done by consensus,’ because antagonistic interests are at stake. A big enough correlation has to be built to move the revolution forward. Due to the very complexity of the process, all the polls got it wrong. They gave Maduro a 15- to 20-point advantage, and he actually won by 1.7%. We never thought that process could be at risk again. We forgot that the oligarchy and its instruments are ferocious. Previously they were capable of staging a business strike, a coup d’état and an oil coup. This time they succeeded in triggering a movement of votes in their favor. The Right grew more and the PSUV shrank.”

The Venezuelan Right has modalities that the Salvadoran Right would find hard to put in practice. Unleashing chaos, promoting violence from extensive fanaticized groups that burn down health centers and killing innocent people is hopefully unrepeatable here. But the Salvadoran Right is quite capable of unleashing a different kind of chaos, threatening and playing with private investment, reactivating death squads or encouraging the activities of organized crime.

“If the elections had been lost in Venezuela,” analyzes Abel Lara, “it wouldn’t have meant that the Right’s candidate would have taken office in that country. The US empire would have come to power. It would have meant the re-privatization of the oil wells and the end of the social projects financed with oil profits. In addition to putting ALBA at risk, that would have provided a powerful message for the Salvadoran Right to discourage people and belittle the FMLN’s electoral offer.”

“We have another solution”

On May 2, Venezuelan opposition legislator Leomagno Flores appeared on El Salvador’s morning TV interview program “Face to Face.” He effusively thanked his Salvadoran counterpart Roberto D’Aubuisson, Jr. for having invited him and picked him up at the airport. He clearly didn’t come to our country just for the TV appearance, but also to generate hostility toward the Maduro government and link the pre-electoral campaign of the Salvadoran Right even more closely to the Venezuelan Right’s post-electoral one.

The Salvadoran people will maintain a similarly close relationship with the Venezuelan people in the coming process. As Abel Lara says, “The victory in Venezuela permits us to argue that our peoples have another solution; not just the Right’s option. There’s an alternative to the US empire, to neoliberalism with its privatizations and pillage of our resources. Being clear about that possibility is utterly important for the Salvadoran people.”

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

Print text

Send text