OpEdNews - Page 2 of Article: El Salvador Rising

Then there is Funes's alliance with the FMLN itself, considered the "bad" left by the national security hawks. FMLN leaders in the Funes cabinet will include the elected vice president and minister of education, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, key ministers for health and educational expansion, and a former commandante in charge of the intelligence services (all discussed below). None of the economic portfolios, on the other hand, went to FMLN representatives, perhaps as a signal to investors.

According to one independent supporter of the FMLN I interviewed, "the government of Mauricio Funes and the government of the FMLN are two separate entities, and will be negotiating the terms of their coalition."

Funes benefited hugely from the rapid growth of Los Amigos de Mauricio, a formidable fund-raising and outreach network, somewhat like Barack Obama's vast independent volunteer structure, with the potential of becoming a political party of its own. While Los Amigos includes former members of the FMLN, its principle founders include members of a modern business elite like Carlos Caceres, later named Funes's treasury minister, and Alex Segovia, his chief of staff. This rising elite tends to be composed of businessmen in technology, banking and real estate development, more than the narrow and notorious "fourteen families" of coffee barons who controlled the country for more than a century. This new class will have to construct a new social contract with the FMLN and social movements rooted among rural campesinos, urban workers, those who toil in the informal economy and the left-wing intellectual class.

This said, it is true that Funes is not part of the movement towards "twenty-first-century socialism" embodied by Venezuela, Bolivia and Cuba, does not seek an ideological confrontation with the United States, and is not a favorite of the Latin American left. It is true that Funes is extremely close to Lula. Funes's wife, Vanda Pignato, is a native Brazilian who met him when she was working as the embassy representative of Brazil's Workers Party in San Salvador. Brazil is loaning El Salvador $500 million, currently more than the European Union, and other forms of Brazilian assistance will follow.

But the new Latin America, despite contradictions, has more in common than not. Besides the unity about Cuba, the continent has rejected the failed neoliberal policies of the Bush years, and seeks to negotiate far better trade, energy and diplomatic deals with Obama. Lula, widely labeled a moderate, recently faulted the Wall Street meltdown on "white-skinned people with blue eyes." The Brazilian-led, southern-tier common market (Mercosur) is compatible with Venezuela's sponsorship of the Andean development project.

Both counties are deeply engaged in Unasur, the twelve-nation initiative to resolve South American disputes among Latin Americans. As Brazil's foreign minister puts it, these projects represent "countries of all ideological strands harboring the common desire of integrating Latin America and the Caribbean as their common space." This Latin America is a completely different continent than the one ripped apart by coordinated death squads, police repression and right-wing dictatorships only decades ago.

If the Funes-FMLN coalition holds together, it will be a microcosm of the political currents already evolving, both in unity as well as tension, across Latin America.

Hillary Clinton must have sensed all this in as she sat quietly amidst other diplomats while one Latin American president after another ascended above her to the inaugural stage. Not only did she sit through the huge applause for the new FMLN vice president (Sánchez Cerén), but for Cuba, and the presidents of Guatemala, Honduras, Paraguay, Ecuador, Brazil and Chile, interrupted by periodic ¡que viva!s for Venezuela, Vietnam, Palestine, and Monsignor Romero. "¿Quienes aqui?" rippled across the well-dressed crowd of dignitaries, professionals and diplomatic observers, and the answer was shouted back, "el Frente Farabundo Martí."

This will be a rowdy coalition.

At a press conference during the inauguration, Clinton turned from the cold war paradigm to more constructive thoughts on the occasion: "Some of the difficulties that we've had historically in forging strong and lasting relationships in our hemisphere are a result of our perhaps not listening, perhaps not paying close enough attention."

How the March election was won

It was very, very close. The final figures for the March 15 national election gave Funes and the FMLN 51.32 percent, versus 48.7 percent for ARENA (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista), the party of the Salvadoran right that had won every presidential election since the 1992 peace accords. In the national assembly, the FMLN won thirty-five seats, ARENA thirty-two and traditional parties the remaining twenty.

The victory was caused primarily by internal factors, but external ones like the Wall Street crisis and the neutrality of the Obama administration played important parts as well.

The ARENA campaign plan was about front-loading, trying first to win January's election in the FMLN-controlled capital of San Salvador, then exploiting that momentum to capture the presidential election in mid-March. They would emphasize the themes of mano duro, free trade and public fear that an FMLN victory would threaten remittances and the temporary protective status (TPS) of many Salvadorans in the United States, and turn the country into a haven for terrorism. Continuous television spots were run associating Funes with the FMLN, Hugo Chávez and narco-terrorism.

ARENA's initial move was successful. The FMLN was vulnerable to charges of mismanagement and crime after a decade in power in San Salvador, and was driven out of office in the January elections. But Funes and the FMLN launched a political counter-offensive.

Funes could portray himself as a genuine independent. His older brother Roberto was an FMLN member killed by the police on August 14, 1980, but he himself had never joined. Instead, he became the country's best-known television newscaster and commentator, periodically harassed by the ARENA and corporate media owners. He was considered a tough questioner, fair-minded, willing to disagree at times with the FMLN, while describing himself as a reporter indignant at structural injustices. Five years ago, Funes expressed an interest in the presidency, but the FMLN chose its Marxist founder and commandante, Schafik Handal, whose candidacy never reached beyond the organization's hardcore base of approximately one-third of voters. The FMLN seemed doomed to perpetuate the pattern, unless something changed internally.

To learn what happened in 2009, I interviewed a longtime contact and renowned FMLN commandante, Eduardo Linares, known as Commandante Douglas Santamaria during his years in the mountains of Chalatanango. Under the 1992 peace accords, Linares became the police chief of San Salvador, and later a member of the capital's city FMLN council bloc, which had been defeated in January. On the day Hillary Clinton was arriving, Linares was directing security preparations for the inauguration and an FMLN rally of 50,000 people. The following day he would be named chief of intelligence for the government.

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