El Salvador's Left Wins with the Ballot, not the Bullet
By Tim Padgett Monday, Mar. 16, 2009
Mauricio Funes Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) Vanda
Pignato and his vice-presidentialSanchez Ceren claimed victory in the
presidential election San Salvador
Even in a Central America riddled with messy civil wars during the 1980s, El Salvador was in a league of its own when it came to Cold War brutality. The country was strewn with countless victims of right-wing death squads, leftist guerrillas, and a national army that enjoyed the backing of the Reagan Administration despite its penchant for civilian massacres. The war ended with a peace agreement in 1992 that ushered in a stable democracy. Ever since, at until last Sunday, the presidency has been the exclusive preserve of the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance, ARENA — whose party anthem still boasts that El Salvador is "the tomb where the Reds meet their end". Well, yes and no.
~snip~
For those tired of the Bush vs. Chavez polarization that has mired the Americas of late, it was an apt coincidence that Lula had been huddling at the White House a day before the Salvadoran vote with the hemisphere's other alpha moderate, President Barack Obama. Funes had identified himself with the spirit of the pragmatic, bipartisan Lula Left in his campaign, and met with the Brazilian a number of times. He hit the stump not in the lefty-red attire favored by FMLN leaders (and by Chavez) but in white guayabera shirts. He also assuaged voter fears by convincing his own party to drop its insistence on lifting El Salvador's amnesty for civil war crimes, on revising the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and on reversing El Salvador's 2001 adoption of the U.S. dollar as its currency.
ARENA, too, has come a long way since the 1980s, when its founder, Roberto d'Aubuisson, sponsored death squads that terrorized the nation and assassinated its leading cleric, Roman Catholic Archbishop Oscar Romero, an outspoken champion of El Salvador's vast poor. But it is still widely regarded as the party of the wealthy right-wing landed oligarchy targeted by the FMLN in the civil war, and under its tenure, the poor still feel marginalized. That's why the FMLN claimed 35 of 84 seats in January's national assembly elections, and won Sunday's presidential poll.
More:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1885573,00.html
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