EL SALVADOR

PUBLIC POLICY, PUBLIC POLITICS
positive impact demonstrated by these
programs in Latin America, along with
the development of policy instruments,
created an opportunity for promoting and
strengthening social protection systems
in various Latin American and Caribbean
countries—policies that are both effective
and aimed at achieving sustainable
human development.
Twenty-four years after the signing
of the Peace Accords, social justice and
equality is a pending quest in El Salvador.
The twelve-year civil war tore apart the
social fabric and eroded social cohesion
in this small country of Central America.
However, it is important to recall that
inequalities and high levels of human poverty
were key reasons for the war.
There have been five democratic
elections since the war ended that have
included the FMLN as a political party,
resulting in three consecutive right-wing
governments of the Nationalist Republican
Alliance (ARENA) (1994, 1999 and
2004) and two left-wing governments
of Farabundo Martí National Liberation
Front (FMLN) (2009 and 2014), thus
providing political alternation. These governments
have undertaken economic and
social reforms in a complex political scenario,
characterized by increased polarization
and systematic political confrontation
between ARENA and the FMLN.
They have shaped the way the country
faces the challenges of good governance,
building and strengthening public institutions
and sound public policies that
address the main social, economic and
environmental issues, and all of these in
the context of globalization. This article
focuses on the social dimension of public
policy and reforms.
Social policies during the first twelve
years of the post-conflict period in El
Salvador were strongly influenced by the
structural adjustment programs and liberalization
reforms known as the Washington
Consensus. An important reform
in social security was the shift of a payas-you-go
pension scheme to individual
retirement accounts privately managed by
the Pension Fund Administrators after the
Chilean model. This 1998 reform sought
to lighten the fiscal stronghold that the
old system had on public finances. Nevertheless,
the transition costs of the reform
remain a fiscal burden; very low coverage
of the population (20 percent) has not
improved; multiple systems coexist (i.e.
Armed Forces), and the economy contains
an extensive informal labor market which,
according to the International Labour
Organization, encompasses 65 percent of
the active population. The political debate
about social security and pension systems,
of problems such as fragmentation, low
coverage and lack of sustainability, continues
to be postponed.
Other social reforms have focused on
primary education and health and basic
infrastructure, redirecting public spending
towards services that help the poor. In
1991 the government implemented EDU-
CO, a decentralized community-oriented
strategy that reached the poorest rural
communities of the country; this helped
expand six-fold the coverage of primary
education in five years. Education reforms
(i.e. curricular) were carried out between
1995 and 2004, and a long-term National
Education Plan for the 2005-2021 period,
the result of a national consultation
process, was put in place. In 2015, the
country achieved the educational Millennium
Development Goal of universal
primary education. The most urgent challenge
now is to ensure the physical safety
of students and teachers in schools, and
to achieve quality education, as well as
longer-term pre-school and secondaryschool
coverage.
The health-care system has been
characterized as being highly centralized
and fragmented; a public sector brings
together different health-care service
schemes—for the general population, for
teachers and armed forces, among others.
The Ministry of Public Health now covers
eight out of every ten Salvadorans in
the country; the Social Security Institute
covers the formal sector workers, among
other entities. In 2009 the National
Health Reform was launched. Its goal was
to achieve equality and universal access to
health-care services, based on a primary
care approach, as well as the promotion of
social and community involvement. However,
this reform must overcome the existing
institutional weakness. Although the
process of change has been implemented
at a slower pace than planned, it has contributed
to the improvement of key indicators,
such as the reduction of maternal
mortality.
Despite these modest but important
advances in education and health, these
sectors faced very limited—below the Latin
American average—budget allocations.
In El Salvador, the public social expenditure
as a percentage of GDP in 2012 was
14.8 percent. Education and health averaged
4 percent each. Social protection
expenditure as a percentage of GDP was
a paltry 4.8 percent (El Salvador government
data).
Poverty and inequality persist as a
common denominator in El Salvador, as
well as in other countries of Latin American
and the Caribbean. We need to put a
human face to the more than 35 percent
of families living in multidimensional
poverty in El Salvador. The Garcías, the
Riveras, the Mejías face a variety of hardships
like the following: eight out of ten of
these families live in crowded conditions,
face underemployment and job instability
and have no access to sanitation; three
out of ten of their children do not attend
school and six in every ten are fearful of
attending school because of insecurity
(Multidimensional Poverty Measure, government
and United Nations Development
Programme).
While other Latin American countries
began expanding social assistance programs
to cover a segment of the population
excluded from formal social security
net years ago, El Salvador did not implement
its first targeted program designed
to alleviate poverty, Red Solidaria, until
2004. The impact assessment and the
program’s positive results encouraged the
new left-wing government to maintain
the program. The program incorporates
rigorous design, implementation and
accountability, based on several management
tools: targeting mechanisms
(geographic and individual), registry of
beneficiaries, information systems and
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