“Si gana Obama
voy a celebrar como si ganara Funes,” said a friend of mine a few days ago,
“If Obama wins I'm going to celebrate as if Funes had won.” Of the folks I talked
to today, many were in a celebratory mood.
“Ganamos,” exclaimed a bolo as he embraced me in the
street this morning, “We won.” Later we
toasted the occasion with overlarge bottles of Pepsi Cola. In a public statement this morning the FMLN’s
presidential candidate congratulated the next United Statian president,
affirming that “sopla un viento de cambio” in the Americas, “a wind of
change is blowing.” Time will tell. With Obama we have the first African-American
president in U.S. history. If Funes wins
in 2009, El Salvador would have—for all intents and purposes—its first
opposition president ever. If he wins,
that is to say, the country would have its first ever president not of the
Right Wing. It would also be the first
change in power since the civil war.
Funes would be the first president in 19 years not of the ARENA party.
With
the possibility of change in the air, ghosts of the past are rearing their ugly
heads. A few days ago in Cojutupeque,
former members of the Guardia Nacional gathered in a large public
meeting to discuss what they termed something like “the threat to the homeland”
that is the FMLN. The Guardia
Nacional, disbanded with the Peace Accords and replaced by the Policía
Nacional Civil, was the national security force responsible for the most
human rights abuses during the El Salvador’s war of 12 years. Of the innumerable massacres, forced
disappearances, and assassinations carried out by government and paramilitary
forces during the years of the conflict—and over the decade prior—the greater
part were perpetrated by the Guardia.
A friend of mine from Cojute, recounting what she had seen of the
propaganda surrounding the assembly, said she was scared by the recent turn in
events.
Last week saw the convergence of the Latin American presidents, along
with their counterparts from Spain and Portugal, in San Salvador for the XVIII
Cumbre Iberoamericana. The ostensible
theme of the summit—the situation of the youth in Iberoamerica—was quickly
abandoned, it seemed, in favor of a broader discussion of the generalized
financial crisis. This was much to the
chagrin of certain student groups and other sectors of the organized youth, who
took to the streets demanding that their voice be heard. To my knowledge, there were no significant
confrontations between the youth and the personnel in charge of ensuring the
security of the event. And thankfully so. With the arrival of the mandatories came the utter
militarization of the streets of Escalón, the wealthy neighborhood in which the
proceedings of the meeting took place.
Some 1,500 soldiers were stationed in the area, along with a greater
number of police officers. Quite an
impasse ensued within the summit itself, however, when Bolivian president Evo
Morales, along with Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Manuel Zelaya Rosales of
Honduras, demanded that the assembled presidents recognize the financial crisis
as a fundamental failure of the capitalist system itself. Suffice it to say that theirs was something
of a marginal perspective within the summit.
One can imagine where Hugo Chávez would have weighed in in the
discussion, but it was decided at the last minute that he would not be in
attendance, along with Raúl Castro.
Rumors abounded as to the reasons for such a notable absence, but in any
case it appears that the move, somewhat ironically, has actually favored the
the Left in the run up to the 2009 elections here in El Salvador. The FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes has gone to
great lengths to distance himself publicly from the figure of Chávez, largely
in response to allegations from the Right that should he come to power, the
Salvadoran government will be converted into a puppet under the influence of
the Venezuelan president.
It is pretty clear by this point that a
sizable portion of the populace does, in fact, believe this to be a real possibility. It's equally clear, though, that with a
largely uneducated populace with limited access to alternative sources of
information, the message sent by the major media institutions has a strong
incidence on views of the public considered as a whole. Two public opinion polls undertaken by the Universidad
Centroamericana (UCA) and the Universidad Tecnológica, respectively,
show the FMLN candidate as having a 15% lead over his primary contender, ARENA
candidate Rodrigo Ávila. Two surveys
undertaken by La
Prensa Gráfica and El Diario de Hoy, respectively,
the most widely circulated newspapers in the country, show Funes as having a
slim 3% lead. Funes, himself a former
journalist of many years, has publicly denounced the news agencies as trying to
influence the public opinion in the favor of the Right.
It’s a fine line I walk, in any case,
meeting with people from different sectors of society and trying to gather as
many perspectives as I can and yet trying, at the same time, not to let the
observation of the electoral process I am undertaking favor any political
agenda. It’s sticky work indeed.
