Josefina Escamilla, protesting in San Salvador to defend her community’s right to water. The FMLN bloc in the legislature voted for a revised version of the law that stopped the privatisation of water, higher education, and healthcare.Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Madeleine Conway
WASHINGTON, Mar 20 2014 (IPS)

After a closely contested election in El Salvador, the progressive Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) has emerged victorious, declaring a narrow victory over a right-wing opposition party that appealed to the military for intervention.

The vote marks a hard-fought victory for the FMLN’s ambitious economic agenda, which has included a host of new social programmes that have improved education and healthcare for millions of Salvadorans.It appears that the United States still isn’t ready to let democracy flourish in Latin America.

But right-wing forces vigorously disputed the election – one that the Organisation of American States called the most transparent in El Salvador’s history – and conditions imposed by Washington are threatening to undermine the country’s gains.

A landmark election

Since taking power in 2009, the FMLN – a former guerilla movement that became a political party in the early 1990s – has ushered in a host of popular social programmes designed to improve living standards in El Salvador, where over a third of the population lives in poverty.

Before stepping down as minister of education to run for the presidency, FMLN president-elect Salvador Sachéz Cerén started a literacy programme that reduced adult illiteracy from 18 percent in 2009 to 13 percent in 2012.

The programme, part of a broader push to make education accessible to all Salvadorans, functions on a two-million-dollar budget and enjoys the support of over 40,000 volunteers. Other reforms include free school uniforms and a glass of milk every day for schoolchildren.

Since 2009, the FMLN has been responsible for the implementation of a healthcare programme that includes primary clinics throughout the country, regional hospitals, and government funding for preventative health measures.

Though healthcare has always been a right under the Salvadoran constitution, access had been restricted as part of privatisation efforts – by 2006, in fact, 47 percent of Salvadorans had been pushed out of the healthcare system. Now, the Ministry of Health serves 80-85 percent of the population free of charge.

The election marks the first time that a former FMLN guerrilla commander has defeated a candidate from the National Republican Alliance (ARENA) – a right-wing political party founded by Roberto D’Aubuisson, the father of the U.S.-backed Salvadoran death squads.

The two parties were the main opponents in El Salvador’s Civil War (1980-1992) and have been the country’s principal political parties since the 1992 Peace Accords. Sanchéz Cerén’s victory suggests that the FMLN’s social programmes and community organising helped the party overcome the fear-based ARENA propaganda that was broadcast by the country’s right-wing-dominated media.

In the run-up to the election, the Salvadoran Electoral Tribunal (TSE) quadrupled the number of voting centers, removed at least 50,000 deceased Salvadorans from the voter rolls, and ensured that poll workers live close to voting centres, making it easier for them to identify fraudulent voters.

These elections also marked the first time Salvadorans outside the country, who comprise over a third of the total population, have been able to vote.

Yet in response to his electoral defeat, ARENA candidate Norman Quijano cried fraud, pushing back the official announcement of a winner by the TSE by several days. Quijano, who had previously declared victory with only 70 percent of votes counted, subsequently called on the Salvadoran military to “implement democracy.”

But David Munguía Payés, the minister of defense, rejected Quijano’s request, maintaining that the armed forces are “committed to respecting the electoral results issued by the Salvadoran Electoral Tribunal.” Days later, the TSE rejected ARENA’s demand to nullify the results and declared Sachéz Cerén the winner.

U.S. intervention

In the past, the United States has given the Salvadoran oligarchy considerable support, including six billion dollars of direct military assistance and training for the Salvadoran armed forces during the war.

More recently, by threatening to withhold foreign aid, the United States coerced El Salvador into enacting last year’s Public-Private Partnership law, which privatises public services and assets to a degree that would cause an uproar if it were attempted in the United States.

The law, an initiative of El Salvador’s bilateral trade agreement with the United States, was written by U.S. Treasury Department advisers with the IMF, World Bank, and the outgoing administration of President Mauricio Funes. The proposed partnership was unveiled in November 2011 during a visit by U.S. President Barack Obama.

If fully implemented, the law would threaten the job security of over 120,000 public sector workers, who have seen wages drop as services have become privatised.

The Bajo Lempa Community – a coalition of communities formed by ex-combatants and refugees from the civil war – warned in a statement that “the promises of employment and economic growth that were to accompany privatization, [U.S.] dollarisation, and the signing of the Free Trade Agreement have never materialised. In their place, poverty, violence, [a] deteriorating environment, and corruption have all increased.”

The community has called the Public-Private Partnership “blackmail” and charged that it “violates the sovereignty of the Salvadoran State and its people.”

Unable to stop the passage of the Public-Private Partnership, the FMLN bloc in the legislature voted for a revised version of the law that stopped the privatization of water, higher education, and healthcare.

Now, U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Mari Carmen Aponte is making the privatisation of these sectors a prerequisite for further funding from the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a U.S. agency that provides foreign assistance on a competitive basis. After a close election, it will be difficult for the FMLN to forgo the Millennium Challenge Corporation money.

When the Salvadoran people voted for the FMLN, they were voting for a platform of increased social programmes and community control. The Public-Private Partnership foisted on El Salvador by Washington could put these goals out of reach.

With the U.S. government leaning on El Salvador to accept a privatisation package that would never be accepted in the United States – and the tenets of which were rejected by Salvadoran voters themselves – it appears that the United States still isn’t ready to let democracy flourish in Latin America.

Madeleine Conway has previously written about the Salvadoran National Literacy Program and is currently working on a documentary about indigenous women leaders in Colombia. An earlier version of this commentary was published by Foreign Policy In Focus.

Rightwing National Republican Alliance (ARENA) activists in front of the Supreme Electoral Tribunal in El Salvador during the recount of results of the presidential election held Sunday Mar. 9. Credit: Francisco Campos/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Mar 13 2014 (IPS)

The few tenths of a percentage between presidential candidates in the elections of Sunday Mar. 9 have been confirmed in the final vote tally, keeping the right in El Salvador in the opposition – and increasingly antagonistic toward the second consecutive government of the leftwing FMLN.

Early on Thursday Mar. 13 the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE) released the final results to a country on tenterhooks, confirming the first count: Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the candidate of the governing FMLN (Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front) has won with 50.11 percent of the vote.

Román Quijano, the candidate for the rightwing National Republican Alliance (ARENA), took 49.89 percent of the vote, the same figure announced in the first count. The absolute difference between the two candidates in this runoff election was only 6,364 votes.

The TSE will officially declare Sánchez president-elect after it responds formally to Quijano’s demand that the election should be annulled. ARENA is unwilling to accept losing by such a narrow margin, and indeed pre-election polls predicted a much more resounding defeat.

“I definitely foresee a combative attitude and greater boycotting of the new government,” social activist Margarita Posada, the coordinator of the National Health Forum, told IPS, in view of the razor-thin margin which has roused ARENA’s hackles.

In the first round on Feb. 2, Sánchez took 48.93 percent of the vote, very close to the 50 percent plus one vote required for outright victory and 10 points above Quijano’s result of 38.95 percent.

Over the last five years, ARENA and the upper echelons of the business community have sustained their rejection of the policies of the outgoing FMLN government of President Mauricio Funes, a distinguished journalist who took office in 2009 and is due to step down on Jun. 1.

The government led by 54-year-old Funes, with Sánchez as vice president, was prudent in the economic sphere but put a strong emphasis on social issues. Its advent ended 20 years of ARENA governments.

This country of 6.3 million people, the smallest in Central America, has a poverty rate of 34.5 percent, some three percentage points lower now than when Funes came to power, according to the official household survey of May 2013.

“Confrontation with the right will be greater now that the next president comes directly from the FMLN,” said Posada.

Sánchez, a 69-year-old teacher, was a commander in the People’s Liberation Forces, one of the five guerrilla organisations that made up the FMLN during El Salvador’s civil war (1980-1992).

The war left 75,000 people dead and disappeared, according to human rights organisations, and ended with the signing of the 1992 Peace Accords in Mexico.

Radicalisation among ARENA supporters became evident from the night of the election, in which 4.9 million voters took part.

Emboldened by their 10-point gain between the first and second rounds, Quijano and the ARENA leadership promoted confrontational actions in the streets to bring into question the victory of the FMLN, which is now definitive.

On Tuesday Mar. 11, hundreds of ARENA activists marched to the TSE, protesting against alleged electoral fraud.

No electoral observers, whether national or international, have given any credence to ARENA’s allegations of fraud. In a special communiqué they expressly stated that the elections were transparent.

The TSE carried out a final scrutiny, comparing the original polling station tally sheets with the preliminary voting results announced Sunday. This process was interrupted on Tuesday because ARENA delegates walked out, protesting that the TSE refused to carry out a vote-by-vote recount, which is not allowed under El Salvador’s electoral laws.

The only exception is when the difference in votes between the parties is less than the number of disputed votes, but the official number of contested votes was only 3,000.

ARENA delegates joined the scrutiny again on Wednesday, making it possible to reach a definitive recount.

Quijano, a 66-year-old dental surgeon and former mayor of San Salvador, on Tuesday requested that the election be annulled, a move immediately rejected by the TSE as unlawful in El Salvador, but to which it is obliged to give a formal answer.

On Wednesday the attorney general’s (AG) office, which oversees elections, issued a statement saying that only one elector was reported to have voted twice, after Quijano called for another rally, this time in front of the AG’s office, claiming there had been 19,000 instances of dual voting.

Taking radicalisation a step further, the opposition candidate said that if the TSE ratified Sánchez’s victory – as it did – he would create a parallel government to that “imposed” by the FMLN.

“ARENA has created a tense situation unnecessarily. There is no mechanism for a vote-by-vote recount,” Juan José Martel, a member of the Junta de Vigilancia Electoral (the official Electoral Oversight Board), told IPS.

“Shock tactics and a boycott of the new government (on the part of ARENA) can be expected, although this will also depend on the governance style of the FMLN,” said Martel. “What is clear right now is that their strategy is to cause destabilisation,” he said.

The military, a key actor, stated it would respect the state institutions and the result declared by the TSE.

“The armed forces reaffirm their complete respect and loyalty to the institutions of the country,” David Munguía, the defence minister, said on nationwide television.

In the long night following the election, Quijano claimed victory when only 37 percent of the returns had been scrutinised, and he called on the army to stay alert.

The media, which mainly take a conservative line, have echoed Quijano’s position, leading to part of the population suspecting fraud.

“The press has been following the same rightwing script ever since the start of the campaign,” journalist Leonel Herrera, executive director of the Asociación de Radios y Programas Participativos de El Salvador (ARPAS – El Salvador’s Participative Radios and Programmes Association), told IPS.

“The media are playing a dangerous role, because instead of expressing support and respect for the institutions, they are adding to the chaos instigated by the right,” he said.

Commenting on the scant additional support among voters for Sánchez in the second round, analysts highlight the fear campaign waged against the FMLN candidate because of his history as a former guerrilla. His party did not make the most of counter-balancing this view, for instance by emphasising his peaceful career as vice president.