VHeadline commentarist Arthur Shaw writes: Big changes are taking place in the balance of power between imperialism and revolution in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Sunday, March 15, the heroic people of the El Salvador elected Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), as the next president of El Salvador. El Salvador presently has a reactionary bourgeois regime that is the most servile and the most despicable of all the pro-imperialist regimes in Latin America and the Caribbean. So, the ouster of the reactionary sector of the Salvadoran bourgeoisie from power is a severe blow to US imperialists as well as to the bourgeoisie in El Salvador.
The FMLN gloriously fought a 12-year war against the genocidal US imperialists and Salvadoran bourgeois reactionaries, negotiating in 1992 a peace when the world balance of power shifted unfavorably after the collapse of the USSR.
The FMLN is the second party with experience in armed struggle, after the 2006 victory of the FSLN in Nicaragua, that has recently won power in Central America.
Most FMLN-governed municipalities and parishes in El Salvador have participated in Venezuelan-sponsored Petrocaribe and ALBA programs for several years. It is likely that Salvadoran participation will expand significantly after the election of a FMLN president. The new FMLN government will face tough problems in jobs, housing, health care, education, and nutrition inherited from the current and previous bourgeois regimes and exacerbated by the world capitalist collapse.
Salvador revolutionaries in the FMLN expect the bourgeoisie to wage a vicious class struggle to stop any redistribution of the national income from the pockets of the avaricious bourgeoisie to the impoverished workers and the rest of the masses. In addition to these social and economic difficulties, El Salvador also faces the problem of being "mexicanized," that is, a prolong assault by a bloodthirsty alliance of the dope-dealing and human smuggling lumpen class with the elements of the local bourgeoisie and with US imperialists to wreak havoc and carnage on society with the ultimate end of the seizure of state power for a death squad regime similar to the one that rules Colombia. Many countries in Latin America and Caribbean are being "mexicanized."
Lenin says the passing of state power from one class to another is a revolution.
If this is the case, then the March 15 election is the beginning of a current stage of a Salvadoran revolution and it is most unlikely that the Salvadoran workers, advanced ideologically, organizationally, and politically, will blow or waste their revolutionary opportunity.
