Leave El Salvador Alone!

Mauricio Funes, El Salvador’s president elect, delivers his victory speech last Sunday. (AP Photo/Luis Romero)

As thousands of people celebrated the election of leftist Mauricio Funes to the presidency of El Salvador this Monday, U.S. State Department Spokesman Robert Wood congratulated the victor. “We look forward to working with the new government of El Salvador,” Wood announced during his morning briefing. Normally there wouldn’t be anything odd about such a statement, but what would in another context have been a mere diplomatic nicety took on special weight in this tiny Central American republic, where the United States has a regular—and often brutal—history of interference.

Funes ran on the ticket of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the former Marxist guerilla movement turned constitutional political party. In the past, the United States has blatantly interfered with Salvadoran democracy to prevent FMLN victories, actions that included then-President Ronald Reagan’s open support of the murderous right-wing campaign to suppress the rebels in the 1980s. Since the war’s end, the Salvadoran right has effectively exploited fears of potential U.S. interventionism, leading to 20 years of conservative rule. This time around, however, the right’s fear tactics didn’t pay off. In large part this was due to Funes’ much-praised moderate credentials, but neglected in the media coverage of Funes’s victory is the impact of another moderate politician: Barack Obama.

Without Obama’s presidency, it is quite possible that ARENA would be digging in for another five-year term. In contrast to previous American presidents, Obama insisted upon a policy of neutrality toward El Salvador, and the Salvadoran people seem to have believed him when they went to the polls.

Previous administrations were not shy about warning the Salvadoran electorate away from parties and politicians seen as ideologically at odds with the United States. El Salvador’s internal politics have been subject to unusually overt meddling due to a long history of American intervention that resulted in close ties between ARENA and the American right, beginning with Reagan’s funding and training of the mercilessly repressive military in the 1980s, which carried out extensive atrocities throughout the country, including mass executions and routine torture.More recently, the Bush administration and Republican congressional representatives exerted undue influence in the 2004 presidential elections. ARENA’s victory then was aided by what amounted to economic blackmail on the part of congressional conservatives, who threatened to change the laws allowing remittances (funds sent by Salvadorans living in the United States to their families back home), which account for 20 percent of the Salvadoran gross domestic product, to flow unencumbered between the two countries.

“It was hugely important that the executive branch was not Republican here,” said Buddy McLaughlin, a National Office staffer for the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador (CISPES), an activist organization created in the 1980s to protest U.S. military aid to El Salvador.“A crucially important aspect of the right-wing strategy was the ability to make threats from the floor of the [U.S.] Congress about cutting off remittances and preventing Salvadorans from getting a visa to the U.S. But those two threats wouldn’t hold a lot of water in a Democratic Washington.”

Although the right, both in Washington and San Salvador, did not succeed in bullying the Salvadoran electorate, they tried. ARENA (whose anthem still trumpets El Salvador as the tomb “where the Reds die”) attempted to turn the election into a referendum on communism by claiming that Funes and the FMLN were indelibly tainted by their radical past and their ties to Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez (ties which are, in reality, non-existent—there has never been any proven link between the two).

ARENA also purposefully evoked memories of El Salvador’s gruesome civil war, which lasted from 1980 to 1992, pitting the brutal U.S.-backed military against the FMLN insurgency. Between 70,000 and 75,000 peopled died, predominantly at the hands of the army and its paramilitary death squads. At the conflict’s height Reagan was providing the military government with $1 million a day, not to mention training, weapons, and military advisors.

The war created a lasting impression that left-wing dissent could easily be suppressed by vicious death squads. (As a U.N. Truth Commission stated, “Anyone who expressed views that differed from the Government line [during the war] ran the risk of being eliminated as if they were armed enemies on the field of battle.”) Peace accords were signed in 1992, but the memory of intervention and bloody repression has lingered, haunting every election cycle since. “For some people, the lesson of the ’80s is that you can do nothing without U.S. approval or you will have trouble," Miguel D’Escoto, the ex-foreign minister of Nicaragua’s Sandinista government, told the Washington Post. The Salvadoran people learned a similar lesson, and ARENA capitalized on it.

“The right constantly campaigns with the message that [the FMLN still] are guerilla leaders, they are commies and if you elect them the United States is going to launch this terror war all over again,” Mark Engler, an analyst for the think tank Foreign Policy in Focus, said in a phone interview. “That is a fairly credible threat in El Salvador, because A, you have this history where the United States did massively intervene and send billions of dollars in military aid, and B, you have statements coming from U.S. officials that sort of confirm this impression.”

During this last election, rightist members of Congress obligingly took up ARENA’s talking points, calling the FMLN “pro-terrorist” and again claiming that Funes was sponsored by Chavez. Just last week, Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA), a former Reagan speechwriter and member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, warned against voting for the FMLN at a committee hearing. “If El Salvador decides to turn to the left and to anti-American regimes like the FMLN then they should not expect a policy that permits four billion dollars of remittances [to] come from the United States to El Salvador,” he declared.

Salvadoran media, most of which is biased toward ARENA, gave heavy coverage to the ominous congressional rumblings, often disingenuously placing their statements above pictures of Obama. These scare tactics, and others like them, contributed to the narrowness of Funes’s victory; in the beginning of the campaign, before the Republican diatribes began to take effect, he had been leading by double digits in the polls.

An American administration that embraces democracy, rather than tampering with it, is a welcome change. However, the troubling influence the United States holds over El Salvador will not dissipate so easily. American leverage has manifested itself in other, less overt ways, chiefly trade and economic policies, like CAFTA, that have proved unpopular with Salvadorans, destroyed agriculture jobs, and sent food prices soaring. The FMLN has consistently ridiculed the previous administration’s trade policies, and Funes has agreed that their effects were terrible, but—in a move many saw as attempting to court the United States—he declared that it was too late to renegotiate CAFTA or alter the dollarization of the economy.

If Obama wanted to completely break with past U.S. policies, he could go to the upcoming Summit of the Americas with a plan to renegotiate CAFTA in a broadly beneficial manner, rather than simply focusing on a limited concept of economic growth. However, as much as the National Review may insist on it, Obama isn’t a socialist or radical of any sort, and his party is still beholden to corporate interests. So, such an economic recalibration is unlikely.

As a rule, political reshufflings in small Central American republics don’t get much national attention in the United States, unless the body count is abnormally high. But because of the degree to which the United States has interfered with Salvadoran politics, the occupant of the White House is of central importance to the country’s electoral politics and to the way it is ruled. Whether Obama’s policy of noninterference is a fluke or a carefully considered policy is yet to be determined. After his election, Funes told a huge crowd of supporters, “We’re entering a new stage in our history now that candidates from the left have reached the presidency and the vice presidency.” Unfortunately, what happens in this new stage still isn’t entirely up to him.

Jake Blumgart is an editorial intern at Campus Progress.

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