AFTER A 12-year civil war and a peace undermined by soaring crime, left-wingers in El Salvador are on the verge of completing a remarkable journey from armed struggle to the presidential palace.
Their candidate is a veteran television broadcaster and talkshow host, Mauricio Funes, whose Facebook page lists his political views as “other”.
Funes (49), a former correspondent for CNN en Espanol, was recently recruited by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), the revolutionary group-turned-mainstream political party that is favourite in the polls to win the presidency in a vote scheduled for Sunday.
Though the FMLN standard-bearers campaign dressed in red, Funes favours a white shirt, jeans and designer glasses. And while some of his FMLN stalwarts still favour rhetoric that evokes Cuba’s Castro brothers, Funes considers himself to be El Salvador’s Barack Obama – an agent of change in a country with the highest murder rate in Latin America and an economy in free fall.
The comparison is overt: Funes and the FMLN use images of Obama in advertisements, saying both were smeared by opponents as allies of extremists. The FMLN television spots complete the link by using the Obama slogan, “Yes, we can”, in English and Spanish.
“During the entire history of El Salvador, the left has never had such opportunity to win as it does now,” says historian José Raymundo Calderón Morán of the University of El Salvador. “The people see a possibility for change because, one way or the other, they are demanding something different, no matter who wins.”
FMLN guerrillas in the 1980s and early 1990s fought a repressive military government that was backed by arms, training and billions of dollars in aid from the US in one of the last conflicts of the Cold War. More than 70,000 died in the 12-year war, many of them peasants.
The war ended without any real winners in a UN-brokered truce in 1992, which saw the rebirth of the FMLN as a traditional political party. Today, the FMLN has mayors in city halls across the country and recently won 35 of 84 seats in the national assembly, making it the top vote-getter.
A win by Funes would put another Latin American country firmly on the political left, joining Brazil, Chile, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay and Nicaragua.
The question about Funes in the minds of voters is what kind of left. Will it be the democratic, globalised, pro-business, moderate left that is friendly to the US, like Brazil? Or the populist, hardline, nationalistic left that is antagonistic to the US, like Venezuela? Funes has said his left is the moderate kind, and that the Cold War needs to end in El Salvador.
“The business community is not afraid of us,” Funes has said. “And we are not afraid of business. I will work to strengthen the relationship with the US, to make the US more of a partner, and I think we will work well together.”
El Salvador’s close relationship with the US has been a campaign issue. As many as two million Salvadorans live in the US. Remittances from Salvadorans abroad are estimated at $3.8 billion (€2.98 billion) annually, about 20 per cent of gross domestic product.
Funes’s opponent is Rodrigo Ávila (44), who represents the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena), which was formed by Cold War conservatives and won the last four presidential contests.
Ávila says Funes is a puppet who will serve his true masters – the FMLN hardliners who want to turn El Salvador into a Venezuelan satellite. – (LA Times-Washington Post service)