El Salvador

Between north and south

Ollantay Itzamná

01/02/2014

Opinión

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El Salvador, one of the six states of Central America has the smallest territorial extension of the region, and the highest population density of the Continent. With 20,742 Km2 there are 6.3 million inhabitants. At the present time, it is the second Central American country (after Nicaragua) to attempt to free itself from U.S. domination, and to join the vital project of the South.

El Salvador, between 1871 and 1931, attempted to modernize under the sway of the liberals. However, this attempt was violently put down in 1931 by clerical conservatives who stayed in power until the final decades of the twentieth century, under the tutelage of different U.S. governments.

U.S. governments, in order to maintain their hegemony in the region, promoted the most savage military dictatorships ever seen in this small country. U.S. state violence ended up pushing the country into a civil war that lasted for 12 years (1980-1992), assassinating over 75 thousand Salvadoran citizens. The militia of the servile national catholic oligarchy, desperate to maintain its privileges, even assassinated nuns, catechists, priests and one Archbishop. The watchword was always: "Anyone who attempts to open the eyes of the Salvadoran people is our enemy."

The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front

The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front was created in 1980, as a coordinating body of the five political-guerrilla organizations (FPL, ERP, RN, PRTC and PCS) of El Salvador, to demand the recognition and fulfilment of rights historically trampled on by the Salvadoran State-Army.

This organization was legally recognized as a political instrument for national liberation in the Peace Agreement of 1992. In 2004, overcoming some internal divisions, including some group desertions of elected national deputies from the FMLN, ratified their socialist orientation and undertook the process of internal strengthening through their "Farabundo Marti" school of political formation. In 2009, with 51.32% of valid votes, they won the presidential elections with the candidates Mauricio Funes and Salvador Sánchez Carén.

The Republican Nationalist Alliance (ARENA) to humiliate El Salvador

For their part, the government of the U.S.A. and the Salvadoran oligarchy created the political party Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) in 1981, for the purpose of democratically burying the "red communists" that they had not been able to defeat by force of arms during the war.

ARENA became the governing party in 1989, and remained in power until 2009. In these two decades, they succeeded in implanting the neoliberal system (along the lines of the Washington Consensus), impoverishing even more the great majority of the people in the country, expelling more than two million Salvadorans as migrants without clear destinations, flooding the country with drug-trafficking cartels and bloody juvenile gangs, and consolidating the structures of organized crime. All this was done with the complacent silence of various U.S. governments.

Achievements and the outstanding agenda of the FMLN government

El Salvador remains one of the most violent countries of Central America, surpassed only by Honduras and Guatemala. Here, an average of six people are assassinated daily. In Honduras and Guatemala daily assassinations amount to 17 and 20 persons respectively.

The Salvadoran GDP amounts to 23 billion dollars, surpassed only by Guatemala (50 billion), Costa Rica (45 billion) and Panama (36 billion). And with 34.5% of the population below the poverty line, they are surpassed by Guatemala (54%) and Honduras (65%) (1)

In 2009, daily assassinations amounted to some 15 people. By 2012 the violence had been reduced to an average of 6 daily assassinations. In 2011, the World Bank estimated that 40.6% of the Salvadoran population lived in poverty, but this percentage was reduced by six points in 2012 (34.5%) (2)

The struggle against poverty and strategies against criminality began to bear fruit and to sow sense and hope in the collective imagination of Salvadorans.

El Salvador at the Crossroads

The present electoral process will not only measure the degree of legitimacy of the FMLN, but will above all represent a diagnosis of the libertarian conscience of the Salvadoran people. There are only two ways open: return to the sad past, under the violent neoliberal dictatorship of the 14 most opulent families of the country, or to continue to consolidate the promising and fragile process of integral liberation begun under the FMLN. Either the remilitarization of the country in order to surrender economic improvement to private interests, or the liberating education for the exercise of participatory democracy.

ARENA, backed by the U.S. government, employs and undertakes the most implausible strategies in this electoral process, in order to re-drowse a people that had begun to awaken. According to official denunciations, during the electoral campaign ARENA has created irregular organized forces (such as OMEGA) to increase the number of assassinations, and thus call into question the achievements of the security policies undertaken by the present government, and to sow fear and confusion in the country (3).

In the Central American region the U.S. Empire has managed to maintain its hegemony only through military violence and credulous ignorance on the part of the population. This spell appears to be breaking under the praiseworthy examples of Nicaragua and El Salvador that have undertaken authentic paths towards their liberation, illuminated by the emerging projects of Life coming from the South.

(Translated for Alai by Jordan Bishop)

Notes:

[1]http://www.hn.undp.org/content/honduras/es/home/ourwork/povertyreduction/overview.html
[2]http://datos.bancomundial.org/pais/el-salvador
[3]http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=180158

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