[NYTr] El Salvador: The Tables are Turning

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Granma Daily -  14 November, 2007
http://www.granma.cubaweb.cu/english/news/art66.html

El Salvador: The Tables are Turning

By ORLANDO ORAMAS LEON

El Salvador is practically the only country in Central America where
the extreme right is in power. Its servility to the United States led
it to sending troops to Iraq. It has also been a sanctuary over the
years for notorious terrorists and mercenaries such as Luis Posada
Carriles and his partner in crime Francisco Chavez Abarca.

However, the start up of campaigning to elect leaders for the Farabundo
Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) for the 2009 presidential
elections has the governing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA)
showing concern over the party’s momentum and widespread popular
support for the frontline running team of journalist Mauricio Funes for
president and former guerrilla commander Salvador Sanchez Ceren as his
running mate.

The stands were packed last weekend at the Cuscatlan Stadium in San
Salvador with thousands of people attending a rally where the FMLN
announced the party candidates. Funes, a reporter known for his
criticism of the government, leads a list of 26 as the most popular
among potential candidates, which has the ARENA leadership nervous.
ARENA was founded in 1982 during Washington’s dirty war in El Salvador
and is closely linked to the death squads that brought mourning to
thousands of Salvadoran families and assassinated Archbishop Oscar
Arnulfo Romero.

The FMLN seeks the presidency for the fourth time, leading the way in
the endeavor to offer new perspectives within the regional and
international panorama, and taking advantage of the dissatisfaction of
the majority of Salvadorians who are dissatisfied with the servile and
exclusive politics of the governing party.

Funes told the crowd that if elected he will invest heavily in social
programs to fight poverty and confront the galloping crime wave
involving thousands of young people who belong to youth gangs known as
maras. The FMLN maintains that ARENA’s attempts to address the problem
with a "hard handed" approach, often involving extrajudicial killings,
have failed.

Thus, it is a great irony that Salvadorian President Antonio Saca, a
fan of Bush, was chosen to host the 18th Ibero-American Summit in 2008,
whose central theme is young people.

ARENA’s policies have large percentage of Salvadoran youth to emigrate
looking for other horizons, while others, marginalized and forgotten,
have no option but to join the gangs. ARENA is also responsible for the
culture of violence that reigns in the country, where, 15 years after
the peace accords, more people die each day than during the bloody war
fuelled by Washington.

Last year 3,928 violent deaths were registered and 2007 is advancing
towards giving the tiny nation the continental’s highest homicide rate,
a result of the failed strategy of repression and the abandonment of
any social concerns under ARENA governments during more than 15 years.

The end of the civil war did not bring peace, but further shattered the
country with the application of neoliberal economic policies of
privatization and the opening up to foreign capital which hit the
poorest sectors the hardest.

The FMLN candidate said if elected he would strengthen the role of the
State, in a full turn from the policy that privatized everything (bank,
telecommunications, energy). Meanwhile, privatization of public
hospitals, social security, and water and sewer services are currently
on the drawing board of Saca and the people around him.

The FMLN says it will end the privileges that "enrich a few even more"
and stop "the servile nature that has characterized the ARENA
governments in relation to the United States," said Funes. He also
announced that he would end the sending of troops to Iraq and reorient
foreign policy away from the dictates of the White House.

The reaction from Saca and his rightwing associates came without delay.
In its usual fashion, ARNEA launched a perennial campaign of lies and
scare tactics, as they successfully did during the last elections,
campaigning on the blackmail that the United States would cut off
family remittances of the nearly two million Salvadorans in that
country as a reprisal if the FMLN won.

Although it wasn’t a communist who said "you can’t fool all of the
people all of the time," the door could be opening to the truth in El
Salvador, home of ultra-rightwing accomplices of terrorism that sooner
than later will be replaced in power by a battle-hardened people, on a
day envisioned by the late poet Roque Dalton.