EL SALVADOR

EL SALVADOR
Beyond the Political Pendulum
A New Type of Political Consensus? BY LUIS MARIO RODRÍGUEZ R.
IN 1994, PERUVIAN WRITER MARIO VARGAS
Llosa asked David Escobar Galindo what
he thought was the most transcendental
change in El Salvador between the elections
held before the peace accords and
the elections to be carried out that year,
the first in which the former guerrillas—
the Farabundo Martí National Liberation
Front (FMLN)—had ever participated.
Escobar, member of the El Salvador government
commission that had negotiated
the peace accords, replied with his typical
insightfulness that Salvadorans “now
don’t know who will win the elections.”
The uncertainty of the electoral outcome,
in contrast to the certainty of the previous
thirty years in El Salvador because of
scandalous frauds, is one of the principal
requirements for all electoral contests
anywhere.
The Vargas Llosa interview in El Salvador
came two years after the 1992 signing
of the peace accords. History had
shifted with the fall of the Berlin Wall
in 1989. In nearby Nicaragua, the ruling
revolutionary Sandinistas were swiftly
weakening, and in El Salvador, the candidate
of the political right—represented
by the Nationalist Republican Alliance
(ARENA)—had defeated the Christian
Democrats at the polls.
That political context pushed the
armed actors to negotiate. Frank dialogue,
with the United Nations as witness, led to
a political pact with more relevance even
than the 1821 declaration of independence.
The signing of the peace accords
took place at the emblematic Chapultepec
Castle in Mexico City on January 16, 1992.
FMLN negotiator Salvador Samayoa,
who signed the peace accords on behalf
of the former guerillas, said that from that
date on there would be an “explosion of
consensus” (Samayoa, 2002). As a result
of that historical event, a good portion
of El Salvador’s democratic institutions
began to experience new life. The Armed
Forces became subordinate to civil power;
the electoral commission underwent
a profound transformation; the way in
which Supreme Court judges were elected
was modified and an Attorney General
Office for Human Rights was established.
The protagonists of peace accepted electoral
democracy as the best mechanism
for distributing political power. Between
1994 and 2015, fourteen elections have
been held in El Salvador: five presidential
and nine congressional and municipal.
Yet it took until 2009 for the FMLN to
win the presidential elections, defeating
the right-wing party that had governed
the country for the previous twenty years.
However, during the two-decade period
in which the presidency had remained
in the hands of one party, the FMLN
exponentially increased its quota of political
power, both in the legislative assembly
and in local races. Maintaining presidential
power within one party caused the
democratic transition that began in 1992
to be seen as limited. The alternation of
power was needed to consolidate the
peace accords and increasingly, with more
and more conviction, the political parties
recognized the possibility of alternation as
a stabilizing factor in Salvadoran politics.
At the same time, the country’s historic
polarization kept fear alive about traumatic
changes in government that would
recklessly swing from one ideological current
to another. Fear of what irreconcilable
differences could bring was inherited
from the pre-democratic society and had
endured in the period following the signing
of the peace accords, hindering the
country’s transition to a new democratic
society. However, both in 2009 and 2014,
The alternation of power was needed to consolidate
the peace accords and increasingly, with more and
more conviction, the political parties recognized the
possibility of alternation as a stabilizing factor in
Salvadoran politics.
the political parties accepted the popular
will without much fuss. Mauricio Funes
and Salvador Sánchez Cerén, respectively,
won the elections without the principal
opposition party or de facto groups’ boycotting
the legitimacy of both electoral
processes. Thus, despite the narrow margin
in the election results in both elections,
2.56% in 2009 and a mere 0.20% in
2014—the narrowest difference between
two presidential opponents in the history
of elections in Latin America—the losers
accepted the decision of the courts processing
challenges of the election results.
Now that the country has managed to
break the pattern of one-party presidential
control, new challenges have emerged.
The FMLN administrations have shown
both positives and negatives—lights and
shadows, as we say in Spanish. Each of
the candidates who became president has
shaped the presidency through his distinct
personality and history. Mauricio
Funes Cartagena is not a FMLN militant
14 ReVista SPRING 2016