The hardest strategic decision was whether to support Funes in an effort to win, or to once again put forward a commandante candidate destined to lose.
Paying close attention to their popular base, Linares said, the party heard a massive call for a strategy to finally defeat ARENA, its police and free-market policies. A majority of the party's militants also concurred, that they needed "a plan to take the right out of power," to "start believing in themselves as a party strong enough to win," and put forward Funes, the only candidate who "would not make the people afraid and the right afraid."
Not everyone on the left was in agreement, and the possibility of a long fratricidal primary loomed, with the FMLN's factional disunity on public display. Therefore, Linares said, the party adopted a plan to pre-empt other candidates and unify early around Funes. "We became verticalist," he said. "Internal democracy wouldn't work in the primaries, but at least we had the advantage of knowing what the people wanted and the party members too."
Other domestic factors helped the FMLN coalition along. ARENA and the Salvadoran right were splintering among themselves. In a bizarre twist, a faction of evangelicals blessed the Funes-FMLN ticket in the final days. But the most important issue factor was the Wall Street meltdown, whose social impact brought back deep historical memories. The FMLN had risen from such a crisis eighty years before; according to a recent Lonely Planet guide, "the stock market crash in the US...led to the collapse of coffee prices in 1929. Thereafter, the circumstances of the working classes, and in particular the indigenous Salvadorans, became that much more difficult." The 1932 rebellion led by Farabundo Martí in response to capitalism's collapse was crushed but gave rise to the Front that still bears his name. The next great Wall Street crash, in 2008, according to observers, was decisive in the FMLN's victory in 2009.
The other critical external factor was the role of the new Obama administration, which, under pressure from solidarity activists, made clear its neutrality as the election approached, thus deflating the ARENA claim that protective status and remittances would be repealed with an FMLN victory. According to Linares, "the Obama win (in November 2008) was a big hit against ARENA." The theme of change was in the air. An FMLN delegation had been invited by the National Democratic Institute--considered a hawkish conduit of campaign assistance--to attend the August 2008 Democratic convention in Denver, where they held discussions with party leaders. Obama's declared new diplomacy of dialogue implied the end of the wars, hot and cold, against the FMLN.
But FMLN supporters were deeply worried about a repeat of 2004, when ARENA and US Republicans generated a fear of sanctions if the FMLN won. This time the FMLN, and a strong Salvadoran-American lobby, pressured the administration to dissociate from television ads quoting an Obama senior adviser, Dan Restrepo, and a spiritual adviser, Antonio Bolainez, which warned of disaster if the FMLN succeeded. The ads were a false depiction of Obama's stand on the election. After a torrent of pressure, the State Department's Thomas Shannon issued a statement two days before the election denying an American tilt, dissociating from the commercials and pledging to work with the winner. In an election decided by less than two percent of the votes, the US position became a critical factor.
Four thousand people descended on El Salvador as international observers, most of them longtime participants in the solidarity movements of the 1980s. Fear of a stolen election kept the observers, along with thousands of FMLN activists, on high alert for fraud, including the ARENA tactic of busing in illegal voters from Honduras and Nicaragua. "People became more suspicious and started watching the borders and highways, thinking they had to protect the election for the good of the country," Linares said. Popular radio stations began broadcasting warnings about potential ARENA schemes. Fearing that democracy would be stolen, many Salvadorans took spontaneous direct actions, at one point attacking a bus they believed to be full of illegal voters.
On election night, amid a sea of red banners, red shirts and red posters, Funes proclaimed victory in the name of Monsignor Romero.
How will they govern?
The new Salvadoran government may be the most complex of the new arrangements in Central and Latin America. The majority is slender. Funes is a television commentator, not an executive. The FMLN has a relatively weak record of governance. The unity that was achieved in the electoral campaign may break down on the terrain of governing. The right-wing, like the Republicans here, relishes a nasty oppositional role. The outgoing ARENA government left a $1 billion debt, its corrupt extravagance symbolized by the outgoing president taking 300 people on a goodbye tour of the Middle East.
For answers, I turned to the case of healthcare and the role to be played by another FMLN revolutionary from the war period, Eduardo Espinoza, vice-minister of health in the Funes government. During the war he was "Felipe Dubón," the FMLN's specialist in "battlefield medicine," charged with tending to wounded fighters as well as civilian populations living in zones controlled by the FMLN, all under conditions of aerial assault and guerrilla war. When President José Napoleón Duarte's daughter was kidnapped and held hostage by the FMLN in 1985, Dubón's name was number two on the list of prisoners the FMLN demanded released, an exchange that took place forty-four days later.
I interviewed Espinoza in a leafy open-air coffee shop at the Sheraton Hotel, near the spot where two American labor attachés were killed along with a Salvadoran land reform official, in January 1981. Shocked as a young man by police murders of students at his university in 1975, he felt that "the 1970s started the dream just being realized now," as he prepared to address El Salvador's healthcare crisis in the role of top adviser to the new health minister, the FMLN's María Rodríguez.
I wondered if addressing the institutional healthcare crisis would be harder in some respects than the battlefield medicine he improvised in the jungle. Espinoza certainly was prepared. After the war, he returned to teaching and became dean of medicine at the national university, where his boss, Rodríguez, served as president. During the campaign, Funes promised to expand the share of economic resources going to healthcare from 3 percent to 5, so Espinoza was gearing up.
Dominating the public health crisis are poverty and institutional corruption. Espinosa's research reveals that El Salvador has the highest prices for medicines in all of Latin America and among the highest in the world, adjusted for purchasing power. "It takes $30 to give birth in a hospital, which is impossible when you make a dollar a day. It can mean thirty days without feeding your family, so you don't go to the hospital," he said.
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