When thousands of Salvadorans crammed into the Stadium Cuscatlán in San Salvador the day they inaugurated Mauricio Funes as their new president in 2009, their biggest cheers were reserved for former guerrillas of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN).
Funes had officially assumed the presidency in a staid ceremony earlier on the morning of June 1; by the afternoon, his countrymen had packed Cuscatlán. When unoccupied, its colorful crenellations, arrayed in blue, red, and yellow give it the appearance of a LEGO fortress, but on this day the stadium was a sea of red. The people had come to celebrate Funes, whose arrival was much delayed, but their greater allegiances were to his party. After nearly two decades as a recognized political party, and another decade as a left-wing militia, the FMLN had captured the presidency.
When Salvador Sánchez Cerén appeared onstage that day in 2009, the crowd erupted in applause–a salute directed at his legacy with the militarized FMLN more than his newfound role in the Funes administration. As a commando during the civil war, Sánchez Céren fought under the pseudonym Leonel González; under his leadership, the organization promulgated a manifesto focused on the construction of a socialist state. As the Harvard historian Kirsten Weld noted in a recent review, “unlike in most other regional contexts, the [FMLN] insurgents were sufficiently powerful and well organized that they were able to bring the military state to its knees.” Thus, Sánchez Céren’s leadership in the FMLN provides a proven legacy that extends a quarter-century to the present.
On June 1 of this year, Sánchez Céren assumed the Salvadoran presidency after a hard-fought election that pitted the FMLN luminary against Norman Quijano of ARENA, the primary opposition party, and Tony Saca, formerly the country’s president and the leader of a new third-way movement, UNIDAD. All candidates focused intensely on the country’s dire economic straits, often proposing public investment initiatives with markedly different sources of funding.
President Funes was a young television presenter with no deep historical ties to the FMLN’s guerrilla era—a whitewashed candidate of the left who bore little resemblance to the gore and din of war. In contrast, despite his service as Funes’s Vice President, Sánchez Céren has inevitably been referred to as a “former Marxist guerrilla” in the Western media, an inviolable reminder that behind the veneer of the country’s supposed transformation to a Western-style economy hide the simmering tensions of the not-so-distant past.
The election brought to the fore tensions between FMLN and ARENA that remain as fundamental as the fissures that led to the country’s brutal civil war. At the Peace Accords, signed at the Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City in 1992, the United Nations and the Roman Catholic Church mediated negotiations between the country’s ruling elite and the FMLN rebels, who gained long-desired recognition as a legitimate political party.
What followed was a decades-long process that culminated in Funes’s victory in 2009—the movement of the FMLN from an unfunded party on the periphery of governmental legitimacy to a full-blooded player in El Salvador’s weak democracy. Yet the deep wounds perpetrated during the civil war—not least the assassination of El Salvador’s Catholic archbishop, Óscar Romero, and anti-guerrilla massacres that targeted women and children—remain indelibly central to contemporary political calculus.
The Political Battlefield
The most notable guests at the Sánchez Céren inauguration were Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Evo Morales of Bolivia; the day after he took office, the new president announced that El Salvador would join Petrocaribe, the Venezuelan oil alliance. Sánchez Céren, in his support for a wide social safety net, remains broadly aligned with the goals of his predecessor. But the country’s membership in Petrocaribe reflects further Sánchez Céren’s movement towards the goals of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), a trade organization led by Cuba and Venezuela in favor of social democracy.
During his campaign, Sánchez Céren supported social policies that recalled the platform he advocated as an FMLN leader relegated from the country’s center of power. The trade negotiations facilitated under ALBA have witnessed a notable break with the economic infrastructure of the Americas. Recent trade deals have been orchestrated with the SUCRE, an electronic currency designed to eventually parallel the Euro. These deals, however, have used the as-of-yet intangible SUCRE in lieu of the U.S. dollar, normally the default currency for these transactions.
Sánchez Céren’s plan for social uplift are also intimately tied to the country’s murder rate, the fourth highest in the world. An uneasy truce between two of the country’s largest gangs reduced the number of murders dramatically, but Sánchez Céren seems acutely aware of the need for increasing spending to solidify those gains. Yet even membership in Petrocaribe, with its reduced energy costs, will not yield the government income needed to dramatically reshape the country’s social infrastructure. For that, Sánchez Céren must rely on the issuance of government debt in a political environment upon which global financial markets have not looked favorably.
Despite a round of fundraising late in the Funes administration that collected some $800 million for the country’s government, fears of default led Fitch to downgrade Salvadoran bonds to a bleak BB- rating last summer. Use of the SUCRE signals a move away from domestic monetary policies heavily influenced by the movement of the U.S. dollar; more recently, Sánchez Céren’s gesturing towards ALBA hardens the newfound regional economic focus and adds El Salvador to a list of Central and South American players who have recently eschewed the heavy influence of financial players from the North.
Markets responded fretfully when Sánchez Céren did better than his ARENA opponent in the first round of elections (the UNIDAD candidate garnered 11% of the vote and triggered a runoff). Although Latin American program director Cynthia Arnson at the Woodrow Wilson International Center told Bloomberg that Sánchez Céren’s ARENA opponent “just isn’t trusted to deliver the same kinds of [social] benefits,” investors feared that a leftist leader would be more likely to default on debts than a conservative one and thus demanded higher yields for Salvadoran bonds.
For all his commitment to progressive policies, Funes remained palatable to Western economic interests. Sánchez Céren is older, and carries a legacy that cannot be extricated from that of the war. Stabilizing economic growth and culling violence will require external support; but the new president can only hope that his new government’s posturing won’t alienate these potential allies.
Image credits: www.cispes.org, migenteinforma.org, Los Angeles Times
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