The FMLN won

One FMLN activist said of the first round on February 2, “We lost by a hair.” And of the second round on March 9, “We won by a hair.” The presidential race was that close, but the FMLN still won with the most votes for a single party in the country’s electoral history. ARENA didn’t get El Salvador back.

Elaine Freedman

By 9 pm on election day, March 9, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) had already announced that the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) and its presidential ticket, Salvador Sánchez Cerén and his running mate Oscar Ortiz, had won. The results were very close: the FMLN won 50.11% of the votes with the National Republican Alliance (ARENA) trailing by only 0.22%. But in the second round a single vote is enough to win. so the difference of 6,364 votes was as good as a mile. The race was over.

A prolonged electoral pulse-taking

The campaign for the general elections formally began on October 1 of last year. A month later, the Supreme Electoral Tribunal closed the candidate registration period, confirming the participation of four parties and one three-party coalition: the FMLN, ARENA, the Salvadoran Patriotic Fraternity (FPS), the Salvadoran Progressive Party (PSP) and the Unity Movement (Unidad), a coalition made up of the new GANA party, the traditional National Coalition Party (PCN) and the Christian Democrats (PDC).

Most of the candidates had already been defined during 2012. Salvador Sánchez Cerén’s candidacy was firmed up in April of that year and ARENA formalized that of Norman Quijano in August. Antonio Saca’s candidacy remained a “hooded rooster” until the consolidation of his coalition, which took until February 2013.

Until the first months of 2013 the polls augured a tough battle for Sánchez Cerén and the FMLN. Quijano was the front runner, although the FMLN as a party enjoyed equal or greater popularity. According to a survey at the end of 2012 by the Central American University’s Public Opinion Institute (IUDOP), Quijano led voter intentions with 25.6%, while Sánchez Cerén was pulling 16.1%. In the media and in conversations over beers people repeated that “Sánchez Cerén can’t win” because a former FMLN comandante has a “bad image” by definition. They criticized him for not being a good speaker or argued that being a “professor” wasn’t as distinguished as being a doctor (ARENA candidate Norman Quijano is a dental surgeon). They also dismissed him for his age (69) and his indigenous features. All criticisms revolved around the fact that the FMLN candidate didn’t represent the values of a model in which packaging is valued more than contents. Sánchez Cerén wasn’t a “heartthrob” and even though Salvadoran society touts its “human values,” it didn’t seem prepared to gamble on a “sincere man.”

The FMLN positions
its candidate

Throughout last year the FMLN focused on positioning its presidential ticket, particularly Sánchez Cerén. It massively circulated the documentary “Salvador, my history,” released for the first time at the ticket’s launching in November 2012.

Two books he had written also came out, complementing his autobiography, published in 2008. In El Buen Vivir en El Salvador (Good Living in El Salvador) and El país que quiero (The Country I Want), the FMLN candidate explained his fundamental ideas for governing the country.

And late 2013 saw the appearance of another work of his—En el corazón del pueblo (In the heart of the people)—which highlighted the human qualities of his wife, Margarita Villalta. The party’s local work centered on the candidate’s human virtues and his authorship was stressed in the civic consultation for drawing up the government program.

The strategy proved successful. By the May 2013 IUDOP poll, the FMLN candidate had moved to first place in the electoral preferences with 36%, followed by Saca with 28% while Quijano dropped to third place with 24.9%.

ARENA rife with internal
fights and corruption

ARENA’s internal fights were standard daily fare during 2013. Between January and April, 5 of its 33 legislative representatives changed legislative benches.

Coffee magnate José Antonio Salaverría, a former president of COENA, ARENA’s top leadership body, explained that he had resigned from ARENA “over a difference with Paco Flores.” Francisco Flores—the country’s President between 1999 and 2004 then ARENA’s honorary president—was Quijano’s main election campaign adviser, during which time he was accused of being responsible for scandalous corruption cases.

Walter Araujo, another former COENA president and ARENA’s representative in the Supreme Electoral Tribunal, also began distancing himself from his party until, in separate declarations, both he and the COENA leadership refused to recognize each other.

Revelations of acts of corruption during the different ARENA governments, especially Flores’, became increasingly frequent and clear. Last year rang in with the scandal, known as the CEL-ENEL case, involving the sale of geothermic energy and culminated in November when the public prosecutor accused 21 people, 7 of them former Flores administration officials, of embezzlement or complicity in the scam.

Some months earlier, the Public Prosecutor General’s office had issued an arrest warrant for 17 people implicated in a corruption network that operated in the construction of the highway originally named Diego de Holguín but re-baptized Monseñor Romero Boulevard once completed and inaugurated by President Mauricio Funes. Jorge Nieto, the public works minister in President Saca’s administration, headed the list, accused of embezzlement, failure to carry out his duties and aggravated fraud. He went on the run and despite an Interpol red alert continued evading justice until very recently. Former public security minister and ARENA leader Hugo Barrera, also on the list, responded by accusing former public works minister David Gutiérrez of having committed an even larger theft of funds for that highway. They flung charges and countercharges at each other that did little other than fuel general disparagement of their rightwing party.

The Flores-Taiwan case

The last straw was the case of a Taiwanese government donation directly to Flores to help victims of the 2001 earthquake and combat organized crime. It all started when President Funes revealed that Flores was being investigated in the United States for money laundering. Initially there was talk of US$10 million, but the Taiwan government clarified that it had given some US$25 million. The Legislative Assembly created a special commission to investigate the case and Flores, by then Norman Quijano’s main campaign adviser, appeared before it twice. He repeatedly insisted that he had turned the donation over to those it was intended for, although he could never identify who they were. He said he didn’t exactly remember the different donations he had received in checks issued in his name and even spoke of giving out the funds in “little bags of money.” Flores failed to show up to the commission’s third session, explaining in a letter that “I collaborated with the commission in two long sessions, the questions are now repetitive and I have answered them to the point of exhaustion. I have nothing more to answer.” The Police went looking for Flores to accompany him to the legislative commission, but so far he seems to be mirroring the fate of the donation: he hasn’t shown up anywhere.

ARENA’s internal fights and its’ leaders involvement in acts of corruption were affecting the party more and more. Even Quijano was accused of having a well built with aid money from the government of Japan on one of the properties of his now ex-wife as a “favor” from the then-president of the National Water and Sanitation Administration.

The polls got it right
on the first round...

Almost all polls this year gave the FMLN a lead of between 8 and 14 points over ARENA prior to the first round.

Tony Saca’s Unidad, which had shown something of a surge in the first half of 2013, then leveled out and by the elections was far behind. However much he wanted to present himself as “a new candidate” with answers for all the country’s ills, Saca couldn’t get around the fact that people already knew him and his shameful history as COENA president and as President of the country.

The first round of the elections was held on February 2, with a turnout of 55% of the registered voters. The FMLN took first place with 1,315,768 votes (48.93% of all valid votes, only some 27,000 short of winning outright); ARENA came in second with 1,047,592 (38.96%); and Unidad finished third with 307,603 (11.44%), followed by the PSP and FPS with only 17,973 (0.67%) between them.

The polls had been right, even in their forecast that no party would win on the first round. Although the FMLN got the greatest number votes by a single party in El Salvador’s electoral history, the legislation establishes that if no party wins more than 50% plus one vote in the first round, a run-off must be held between the parties in first and second place.

...so why were they wrong
on the second round?

The second round was on March 9, and was a very peaceful day. The FMLN beat out ARENA by only 0.22%. While it got 180,000 more votes than in the first round (a 13.7% increase), ARENA got nearly 450,000 more (a 42% increase). The FMLN and ARENA each won in 7 departments, unlike the first round, when the FMLN won 13 and ARENA only 1. Voter participation increased in the second round, with 60% of registered voters turning out.

The “hair’s breadth” of a margin by which the FMLN won was the day’s great surprise. With the exception of the Mitofsky poll, all others had given the FMLN a 10-16 point advantage, suggesting that it would notably benefit from a second round.

As with any surprise, the reasons are many. It must be remembered that the cultural-ideological hegemony in El Salvador continues to belong to the Right. Little progress can been noted in our country in religious terms, gender construction or the handling of issues such as abortion and respect for sexual options. Submission is still the main characteristic of personal, labor and social relations, and “non-confrontation” rather than justice is seen as the basis of harmony and peace.

From this perspective, opting for change, a declared socialist party and a candidate who on top of being a former guerrilla commander is characterized by humility and simplicity was an act of rebellion and conscience on the part of the majority that gave the FMLN its vote.

But such tight results also indicate that a sizable bloc of the population still isn’t excited about the idea of change, even though objectively that change has already benefited it in the 2009-2014 period.

The great majority of Salvadoran voters belong to the dominated classes, because that’s the country’s social composition. While many have benefited from the Funes government’s social programs and generally speaking look quite askance at ARENA’s levels of corruption, much of that same bloc of people voted for ARENA in the second round.

What Paulo Freire called “magic consciousness” still prevails among them. This means they feel powerless to shake off problems that are beating them down; they consider themselves inferior in the face of power, receive reality passively and accept it without really comprehending it. They look to luck, to destiny, to the one on high, to the supernatural for the solution. That way of being in the world is an inheritance from the distant conquest and traditional authoritarianism.

The fear campaign

Those are the people most vulnerable to the fear campaign organized by ARENA, tweaked afresh by its strategist J.J. Rendón for the second round.

For the first round ARENA’s campaign focused particularly on gang violence and the truce among the notorious youth gangs known as maras, the second anniversary of which coincided with the second-round election day. ARENA blamed the FMLN and President Funes for having “made a pact with delinquents” and insisted that social violence had increased in the country, despite objective statistics to the contrary. The campaign held Norman Quijano up as the only candidate who could act boldly against criminals.

That issue was downplayed in the second round. ARENA analyzed that stressing it so hard had been a costly mistake so it redirected the fear in two other directions.

One: Fear of losing one’s job

After the first round, the Ministry of Labor and Social Welfare received 215 charges by employees against bosses who were coercing them to vote a certain way. In 213 of those cases they were being pressured to vote for ARENA and in the other two for the FMLN.

People who have a developed critical consciousness could be threatened by their employers or could even receive money in exchange for pledging their vote, yet still vote freely on election day. But it was learned that workers had been coerced in previous elections, even obliged by their bosses to show them a photo of how they marked their ballot, which gave the coercion more objective weight. For this election, the TSE thus prohibited the use of cameras or cell phones in the voting centers. That weakened the power of the instilled fear, but didn’t fully eliminate its effectiveness.

Two: The “Venezuelan fear”

The other fear was generated by ARENA’s manipulation of Venezuela’s current crisis. In December 2013, the same J.J. Rendón, a Venezuelan expert in “rumorology” who runs a leading business in psychological warfare against Latin American progressive and revolutionary processes, came in as ARENA’s campaign adviser. Given the onslaught of the counter¬- revolution kicked off in his home country on February 12, it was to be expected that those events would be used in the campaign against the FMLN. And indeed, the Salvadoran media skillfully manipulated the acts of violence led by the Venezuelan Right aimed at truncating the Bolivarian revolution to revive old anti-communist ghosts and plant in the collective imaginary the idea that an FMLN victory would lead to chaos, violence and scarcity.

The Ferrari case

Another piece of Rendón’s rumorology work was the Ferrari case. One night shortly before the second round, which coincided with President Funes’ hospitalization for surgery, millionaire Eduardo Kriete had a car accident that wrote off the luxurious Ferrari he was driving. Playing to the morbid side of El Salvador’s grassroots culture, ARENA slapped together a media campaign based on photo montages and vague speculations suggesting that the Ferrari had been carrying Funes and not Kriete. Some bought into the suggestion given that Kriete had fled unscathed while Funes ended up on the operating table. ARENA even accused the President of alcoholism and drug addiction. Later, when that preposterous accusation failed to fly, it was said that Kriete had been the driver and Funes the passenger.

With the unscrupulous complicity of the rightwing media, 12 full days and millions of dollars were spent sowing moral rejection of the President among Salvadorans. In the end, Kriete assumed his responsibility and absolved Funes, but the damage had already been done. After all, mud sticks.

ARENA harvested
Unidad’s first-round votes

Who was most impacted by ARENA’s fear campaign? Above all, it was the largely conservative, traditional, politically inactive, low-income population, particularly those who had voted for Unidad in the first round.

For the second round, Antonio Saca and other leaders of his coalition discreetly allied with the FMLN. Around the country one began to see Unidad flags next to FMLN flags... and later replaced by them. Saca’s move was pure political pragmatism as he couldn’t have projected himself as a thriving rightwing force if he’d allied with ARENA for the second round. But the population that voted for Unidad wasn’t an organized grassroots base of this new party, nor did it have any political vision of its own, so we can assume that the great majority of the 307,603 votes that went to Saca in the first round switched to ARENA in the second, along with the 17,973 of the FPS and the PSP, both of which appeal to military, ex-military and paramilitary forces.

ARENA “on a war footing”

Despite the credibility and respect that has accrued to the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), ARENA refused to admit defeat. On election night itself, Quijano declared himself the winner and “on a war footing.” He committed the crime of sedition by calling on the Armed Forces to be “on the watch” for possible electoral fraud, a brazen move that earned him a communiqué from the Chiefs of Staff rejecting the incitement to violate the constitutional order and interfer in the electoral process.

Taking a leaf from the Venezuelan Right’s model, a style alien to the Salvadoran Right, ARENA mobilized virulent groups
in street demonstrations denouncing the supposed electoral fraud for over a week. It failed in its attempt to drag the prosecutor general into this campaign but did feed the climate of fear again by accusing the Penal Division of having freed thousands of prisoners so they could vote illegally. Its monitors walked out of the final ballot count twice and ARENA filed suit in the Constitutional Court, its most faithful ally in the state institutional apparatus, demanding that the elections be declared “unconstitutional.”

ARENA’s temper tantrums monopolized the headlines in the major media, all of which are either allied with or owned by
the oligarchy. At the time of writing this article, people still hadn’t seen a single headline in the large-circulation newspapers proclaiming Sánchez Cerén the winner and future President.

How far will ARENA take this?

The observers of both the Organization of American States and the Inter-American Union of Electoral Bodies rejected ARENA’s charges of fraud. For its part, the United Nations praised the electoral process’ transparency and expressed its confidence in the TSE, urging respect for its work as the maximum electoral institution in the country.

Undaunted by that show of respect for the electoral process, ARENA forged ahead with its campaign and threatened to set up a “parallel government,” insisting it had no intention of recognizing the legitimacy of the FMLN government. In the last week of March, however, after even the US State Department recognized the electoral results, ARENA finally backed down and admitted the FMLN’s victory.

Which are the real threats and which are empty? The threat of a Honduran-style coup d’état is unlikely. Although there are still former and current military officers who would like nothing more than to stop the democratization process, they no longer control the whole defense structure.

A coup in the style of the current efforts in Venezuela is also relatively unrealistic, because the Salvadoran Right has always preferred open repression with death squads and the like, and has no tradition of fascist-style street fighting. While they have the economic resources to put a lot of people in the streets and keep them there, the probability that the protesters would keep up their belligerence and persistence is minimal.

What about a Paraguayan-style coup? In 2012, a maneuver by the majority fraction of the Paraguayan parliamentary Right ended up kicking Fernando Lugo out of the presidential chair. That would be impossible in this first year of the new FMLN government because ARENA no longer has a legislative majority, but it would surely be prepared to put all its resources into assuring a majority in the March 2015 legislative and municipal elections. The problem for the Right is that the Salvadoran people aren’t the Paraguayan people; they have a long history of both mass and armed struggles. They also have a strong and fortified party and a social movement that closes ranks around it when it comes to dealing with the economic and political Right.

The real challenge is to
“win hearts and minds”

Any new government has many challenges. In the FMLN’s case they are even greater because it wants to transform the system, not just administer it.

The Funes administration was conceived by the FMLN as a transition government. During his term, the grassroots forces were given a place in the state institutionality, a process of social reforms got underway, privatizations were halted and the claws of state corruption were clipped. But there was no progress in the work of structurally transforming society.

In his autobiography Con sueños se escribe la vida (Life Is Written with Dreams), Sánchez Cerén laid out the following: “It is essential for us to take the government, but it is not enough. Conditions need to be set up that willl make it possible for us to undertake genuine structural transformations that can surmount the root causes of social injustice, poverty and the authoritarian political system. I am referring to winning people’s hearts and minds, raising their revolutionary consciousness through an intense and systematic struggle of ideas and concrete proposals for solving their problems and suffering, building an extensive, multifaceted and powerful grassroots organization, hammering out and mobilizing a widespread system of social and political alliances linked deeply to the FMLN with a growing social movement. In other words, achieving a great turnover in the correlation of forces in our favor, as a revolutionary force capable of transforming the country for the good of the people.”

This of course is precisely the panorama that sparks such terror and fury among the Salvadoran and international Right. The belligerence of their reaction to the FMLN’s electoral victory is a sign of their fear that this government could give birth to a process that puts the dominant classes’ hegemony in check.

It’s hard to make governance, defined by the World Bank as a style of government characterized by a greater degree of cooperation and interaction between the State and non-state actors within mixed public and private decision-making networks, compatible with revolutionary advance. Understood that way, governance is the maximum expression of how a traditional system of power functions, while revolution is the radical transformation of that system and organization of society.

The FMLN is now responsible for ensuring both things. It would be a difficult task in any case, made more difficult still as the small margin of its electoral victory doesn’t suggest a favorable correlation of forces.

Funes’ alliances and
the new alliances

In his book, FMLN: a la Presidencia de la República con Salvador Sánchez Cerén (FMLN: To the Presidency of the Republic with Salvador Sánchez Céren), José Luis Merino, a member of the FMLN Political Commission and party strategist, explains that one of the main brakes on the Funes government in moving forward with greater and more in-depth changes was the array of alliances that allowed him to unseat ARENA from government in 2009. Funes was an ally, not a member of the FMLN, and was also allied to a series of social and political personalities and organizations of different political and ideological currents that made up the “Friends of Mauricio” Movement, along with others that for different reasons shared the desire to get ARENA out of the executive office.

In alliances, concessions always need to be made to different, unequal forces. In Funes’ case, the alliances meant that the economic Cabinet ministries weren’t in the FMLN’s hands and didn’t push through more far-reaching changes in the rules of the game. Merino suggests that the current presidential ticket, made up of bona fide leaders of the Left, will make important changes to the content of the concessions granted to the allies.

In its assessment of 2013, the Salvadoran grassroots education organization called Equipo Maíz noted that there are “some 30 FMLN alliances with parties, social organizations, groups of professionals, churches and business sectors.” These alliances were essential to winning both the first and second round of the elections and will probably continue to be pivotal to developing the FMLN’s government program in the coming five years (2014-2019). What brakes will they put on the FMLN’s democratic, revolutionary and socialist program? It’s hard to know.

The raising of consciousness

Sánchez Cerén puts the raising of consciousness as an important challenge for the revolutionary project. It’s crucial to break through magical consciousness so people can understand that their actions have implications in reality, explains Marcos Rodríguez, who has been the FMLN’s country dialogue coordinator since April 2013 and is currently working on the new government plan. In a recent interview published in the digital media La Página, Rodríguez paraphrased Schafik Handal when saying, “We in the party are socialists. El Salvador will be socialist when the people want it, not before.”

The political and ideological formation of society is a major challenge for the grassroots forces. On January 20, 2010, El Salvador’s news daily El Mundo published the following banner headline on its front page “Poll: Population rejects socialism.” And in smaller letters: “Technological University Poll reveals that 78.9% of Salvadorans reject 21st-century socialism,” thus giving the impression that the FMLN’s ideology was contrary to the popular will. This image is false because it sidesteps the fact that “popular will” is a cultural construct fed for hundreds of years by the hegemonic forces of both the country and the world.

No revolution has ever been made with the consensus of 100% of a society or with the active participation of 100% of the dominated classes, precisely because transforming that consciousness is the objective of revolutionary processes. Consciousness is an arrival point, not a starting point.

Nonetheless, given that processes are dialectic and that the current path of electoral struggle requires an ongoing endorsement greater than is the case with other paths, the construction of alternative consciousness becomes an issue of primary importance.

ARENA didn’t recover El Salvador

ARENA’s campaign slogan was very illustrative of its concerns: “We’re going to recover El Salvador.” For the oligarchy, having El Salvador meant having free rein to continue its capital accumulation. It meant controlling the three branches of government. And for its representatives in the State it meant a blank check for corruption.

But they didn’t get El Salvador back. The path to moving toward a more just society remains open. On Saturday March 15, hundreds of thousands of grassroots Salvadorans held a fiesta in the huge Masferrer Traffic Circle in San Salvador’s Colonia Escalón, heartland of the oligarchy, to celebrate the fact that for five years more it will continue being the “turn of the offended” in America’s “Pulgarcito” or Tom Thumb country.

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

Print text

Send text