Leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha in the Ciudad Barrios prison in the eastern Salvadoran department of San Miguel, in 2012. Credit: Tomás Andréu/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, May 10 2014 (IPS)

When left-wing president-elect Salvador Sánchez Cerén takes office in El Salvador on Jun. 1, he will find big cracks in the truce between street gangs brokered by the outgoing administration, which has brought crime rates down in the past two years.

The peace agreement is facing its most critical challenge since it was reached in March 2012, and is faltering but has not been broken – at least not yet.

“As the dialogue breaks down, violence is rising, and the new authorities will have to take a decision to make sure that the peace process among gangs continues,” one of the brokers of the treaty, Raúl Mijango, told IPS. The other broker of the talks was Catholic Bishop Fabio Colindres.

Sánchez Cerén, a leader of the rebel group-turned political party Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), which has been in power since 2009, has not addressed the recent increase in violent crime. Nor have the other members of his team.

The president-elect was vice president in the outgoing government of Mauricio Funes.

But during the election campaign that ended in Sánchez Cerén’s Mar. 9 victory, the then candidate said he would tackle the problem with what he called a “mano inteligente” – as opposed to a “mano dura” (iron fist) – approach to crime; in other words, an “intelligent” mix of crime prevention and security policies.

Until Funes became president in 2009, the anti-crime strategy followed was based on a “mano dura” approach under the governments of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), which had governed the country since 1989.

The new government is under pressure to bring down the murder rate, not only because it is one of the main demands of the population, but also because this year marks the start of the election campaign for the 2015 municipal and legislative elections.

The peace deal signed two years ago by the two main gangs in El Salvador, the Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18, involves a non-aggression pact between them as well as a commitment to call off all attacks on civilians, the police and the military.

The government, meanwhile, agreed to transfer a number of leaders of the two gangs from maximum-security prisons to others with benefits like family visits.

Since then, the number of homicides has plunged from an average of 14 to five a day. The United Nations Office ont Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported in May that the murder rate was brought down from 69.2 per 100,000 population in 2011 to 41.2 per 100,000 in 2012.

But since February of this year, the rate has been rising again, to the current average of around 10 murders a day.

According to police statistics, which have been questioned from some quarters, over 50 percent of all murders in El Salvador are gang-related and 35 percent of the victims are gang members.

There are an estimated 60,000 gang members in this impoverished Central American country of 6.2 million people.

Mijango said the truce began to unravel when the Justice Ministry, during the presidential election campaign, pulled the government out of its role as “facilitator” of the truce, which had enabled the gang leaders to communicate with their followers outside the prisons, and to hand them instructions.

In addition, anti-gang police operations became harsher, which generated clashes with local communities.

According to political analysts, these measures were aimed at showing that the government was tough on crime, for electoral purposes, after the Funes administration helped bring about the peace deal between the gangs.

The outgoing government argues that the rise in violent crime is due to a turf war in a number of areas between the two factions of Barrio 18: the Sureños and the Revolucionarios.

Funes himself said on a radio programme that the truce had practically fallen apart, while Justice and Security Minister Ricardo Perdomo revealed that the gangs now have high-powered firearms and can outgun the police.

Indeed, the police have not done well in clashes with the gangs.

On Apr. 6, for example, in the town of Quezaltepeque in the central department of La Libertad, one police officer was killed and three were wounded during an attack by gang members.

But the major Salvadoran gangs deny that the pact is dead or that there are internal power struggles like the ones mentioned by Funes and members of his administration.

“Despites the attacks it has received, the truce is still in place,” says a communiqué published on Apr. 29, signed by the leaders of the Mara Salvatrucha (MS), the two factions of Barrio 18, and the Mao Mao, La Máquina and Miradas Locos 13 gangs.

The statement was read out at a clandestine conference in San Salvador to which only four media outlets were invited, including IPS. National spokesmen for the MS and the two Barrio 18 factions – the Sureños and the Revolucionarios – participated in the conference. All three asked to remain anonymous for security reasons.

“Do you think that if our two factions were at war, we would be here now, together?” asked the representative of the Sureños.

The spokesmen acknowledged, however, that the truce is not perfect, and that there are “clicas” or “cliques” that are not respecting the guidelines handed down by the gang leaders.

For that reason, they neither denied nor confirmed that gang members took part in the attack on Quezaltepeque.

But they admitted that there is a conflict with a clica that broke off from the
Revolucionarios in Zacatecoluca, a town in the central department of La Paz, which is apparently provoking unusually high levels of violence in the area.

However, the dispute, which is local in nature, doesn’t explain the rise in murders at a national level, they said.

“We have kept our commitment to society,” said the MS spokesman.

But Catholic priest Antonio Rodríguez, who has been involved in the social reinsertion of gang members in Mejicanos, a poor neighbourhood on the north side of San Salvador, told IPS that the communiqué read out by the three spokesmen did not represent the national leadership of the gangs.

“The Sureños are angry about that statement because it is not representative,” said the priest, pointing to the cracks in the peace agreement.

Rodríguez was initially an outspoken critic of the truce, but later gave it his support, alongside Mijango and Colindres, before he distanced himself once again.

Now the priest, who belongs to the Congregación Pasionista, has joined the effort driven by Minister Perdomo to relaunch the peace process among the gangs, with the participation of the assistant bishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chávez, and representatives of evangelical churches and the United Nations Development Programme, among others.

“It’s a civil society pact, not an agreement among gangs,” Rodríguez told IPS.

In the clandestine conference, the gang leaders said clearly that “There is talk about the existence of two peace processes; we only recognise the one that started in March 2012.”

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.

Salvadoran activists Carlos Santos (left) and Fabricio Santín alongside a papier-mâché sculpture of a torture victim with a plastic bag – “la capucha” - on his head. Credit: Edgardo Ayala/IPS

By Edgardo Ayala
SAN SALVADOR, Mar 21 2013 (IPS)

A report containing the testimonies of victims of torture during El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war will be published 27 years after it was written, to help Salvadorans today learn more about that chapter in the country’s history.

The 197-page book “La tortura en El Salvador” (Torture in El Salvador), to be launched in April, contains the accounts of 270 victims interviewed in 1986, in the heat of the civil war, by the non-governmental Human Rights Commission of El Salvador (CDHES). IPS was given exclusive access to the report prior to publication.

Most of the interviews were carried out in the La Esperanza prison on the outskirts of San Salvador by members of the CDHES who had also been arrested, tortured and later imprisoned in that facility, where many of the country’s political prisoners were held in the 1980s.

“In the 1980s it was impossible to publish the document, because of the repression. But finally it will see the light of day,” CDHES director Miguel Montenegro told IPS.

El Salvador’s 12-year civil war left 75,000 – mainly civilians – dead and 8,000 disappeared.

When a peace agreement put an end to the conflict, a lack of funds stood in the way of publication of the report, Montenegro said.

The activist was seized in 1986 by the notorious Treasury Police, and learned first-hand about the torture techniques practiced by the security forces.

Because of their involvement in serious human rights abuses, the National Police, the Treasury Police and the National Guard were dismantled and replaced by the National Civilian Police under the United Nations-sponsored peace accord reached in January 1992 by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) guerrillas and the government of Alfredo Cristiani of the far-right National Republican Alliance (ARENA).

More than 40 torture techniques are described in detail and depicted in drawings in the report.

One of the most commonly used techniques was the “avioncito” (airplane), in which the victim’s hands were tied behind his or her back and the victim was suspended in the air from the wrists, often causing dislocation of the shoulders.

In the “capucha” (hood), a plastic bag was placed over the prisoner’s head, to partially suffocate them, while the “submarino” (submarine) involved simulated drowning.

Other methods were electric shock, cutting off the tongue, or destroying the eyes with chemicals.

“They would take me to a room in the Treasury Police headquarters in San Salvador where the walls and the floor were covered with dried blood,” Montenegro said.

The book also provides profiles of torture victims who were forcibly disappeared.

The abuses formed part of a state policy put into effect by the army high command, and Salvadoran society has a right to know what happened, Montenegro said.

The amnesty law approved by Congress in 1993 protected the perpetrators of war crimes and other human rights abuses committed during the conflict from prosecution.

But retired generals Eugenio Vides Casanova and José Guillermo García, both of whom served as defence minister in the 1980s, were found guilty in 2002 by a U.S. court for the torture of three civilians by units under their command. The court ordered the two retired officers to pay 54.6 million dollars in damages to the civilians.

The CDHES document is coming out shortly after an investigative report by the BBC and The Guardian, published as a documentary on Mar. 5, revealed that retired U.S. Colonel James Steele, a Special Forces veteran of Vietnam who was posted in El Salvador in the 1980s, was later sent to Iraq.

The British media report said Steele, who trained and directed counterinsurgency operations in El Salvador, was sent to Iraq to implement the so-called “Salvadoran option” to fight the insurgency after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq 10 years ago.

Steele was reportedly sent to train special Iraqi police brigades in torture techniques employed in this Central American country in the 1980s.

“It is sad that what was used here in El Salvador is being revived in Iraq; this country served as the school,” Montenegro said.

Another investigation into torture committed during the civil war is being conducted by the Salvadoran Association of Torture Survivors (ASST), founded three years ago.

The ASST has two aims: to find out what happened and to bring complaints before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). “We are documenting the cases, to file formal complaints,” Carlos Santos, the president of the ASST, told IPS.

Santos was studying theatre when he was arrested in 1983 along with another student, Fabricio Santín, in the eastern city of San Miguel, where they were tortured before they were transferred to La Esperanza prison.

“Because no one was ever held accountable or punished for the abuses, there is a risk that they could be committed again in the future,” said Santín. “And that is what we don’t want.”

In 2012, the IACHR accepted a complaint brought by the Human Rights Institute of the Central American University in representation of Santos and Rolando González, another member of the ASST.

The complaint also covers four other cases, including the death of Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton, who was killed in 1975 by fellow members of one of the left-wing groups that made up the FMLN, after he was found guilty of insubordination and spying for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in a “revolutionary trial”.

The case brought before the IACHR accuses the current government of centre-left President Mauricio Funes of the FMLN of negligence with respect to investigating crimes like torture.

The Funes administration has refused to sign the Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture, which provides for in situ monitoring such as unannounced visits to local prisons.

Nor has it ratified the Rome Statute, which established the International Criminal Court set up to try war crimes, genocide and other crimes against humanity that national courts cannot or will not handle.

“These are the things that worry us, because they hinder progress in the search for truth, justice and reparations,” the president of the Committee of Relatives of Victims of Human Rights Violations (CODEFAM), Guadalupe Mejía, told IPS.

David Morales, director general of the government’s Human Rights Unit, declined to comment to IPS on government policy.

Since September 2012, Santos and Santín have been touring the country with the exhibit “Nunca más en El Salvador” (Never Again in El Salvador), which uses papier-mâché sculptures of people to show torture techniques used during the years of state violence.

“Some of the images are shocking, but we want to show them so that this won’t happen again,” Santín said.