Changing Colors in El Salvador

By Emma Vawter:

In many ways, time seemed to have passed over Hacienda Vieja, a rural village of 300 in northern El Salvador. As I drove along the town’s bumpy stone streets a little over a year after my last visit, flowers still decorated the chain-link fences surrounding the nicer houses, generally owned by families with a member sending remittances back from the United States. Bumpy dirt paths still branched off the main road, leading to the more humble, concrete-walled and tin-roofed houses where most of the villagers lived. Children squealed and giggled as they ran home from the village preschool. And the people of Hacienda Vieja greeted my van with a wide smile and enthusiastic wave.

But that day there was one thing noticeably different about Hacienda Vieja. Many of the villagers, who normally wear nondescript jeans and t-shirts of every color, were dressed in a shade of fire-engine red. On shirts, armbands, hats, and necklaces, the letters “FMLN” jumped out in a bold combination of red and white.

The date was March 17, 2009, just two days after the presidential election victory of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) candidate, Mauricio Funes, over the Nationalist Republican Alliance’s (ARENA) Rodrigo Ávila. A long-anticipated moment in the country’s political history, it marked the first time the FMLN had won the presidency and ARENA’s first loss of the executive office since the country’s 12-year civil war gave way to a fragile democracy in 1992.

On election night in the capital, San Salvador, I heard fireworks erupt even before FMLN’s victory was decisive. As election results were tallied, Funes never exceeded Ávila by more than two percentage points, yet FMLN was unable to contain its euphoria over the party’s first-ever taste of a nationwide victory over ARENA.

“How are you?” I asked a 22-year-old girl named Yesenia Funes, who shares the new president’s last name but is not related to him. “We won!” she replied. “Our grins are wider, as you see.” Her irrepressible smile proved her point.

Red Takes Over the Scene

The past 17 years of Salvadoran political history have been largely monochromatic, or rather, tricolor, dominated by the red, white, and blue of ARENA. Known for its neoliberal policies, ARENA was staunchly allied with the United States. Under ARENA, El Salvador went from a country ravaged by decades of civil war to one of the most stable and wealthy countries in Latin America. Yet social programs have been largely forgotten, and poverty remains devastating.

These were the issues the FMLN embraced. Complaining that ARENA had ignored the country’s low-income majority, FMLN focused on social programs and frequently echoed the rhetoric of the

Venezuelan populist Hugo Chávez. Until recently, FMLN had long been the second most popular party in the National Assembly but had never managed to win the presidency.

Passion and Memory

Politics are loud and colorful in El Salvador. People on both sides of the political spectrum brandish party colors in each other’s faces, and young men paint party colors and slogans on every available roadside surface. Indeed, telephone poles are themselves battlegrounds, displaying local drama through the stacked red, white, and blue of ARENA and the red of FMLN.

This passion stems from more than mere political preference. Memories of the country’s fierce civil war, which claimed over 70,000 lives from 1980 through 1992 as guerilla violence and brutal government repression tore the country apart, remain powerful. In a country where anyone over 20 years old has memories tied to war, most people’s political positions are shaped by what side their families were on during the conflict.

While many of the main figures of ARENA descend from the same families that worked in the government, military, and police during the civil war, the FLMN traces its origins to 1980, when it was founded as an umbrella organization of pro-peasant revolutionary groups. The FMLN’s revolutionary activities and the government’s brutal response would escalate into full-scale war soon after.

A Village Untouched by War

Hacienda Vieja, located in the Cabañas department, lies on flat land, nestled between a few isolated mountains. The bulk of the fighting took place in those ridges.

Fortunately for Hacienda Vieja, the fighting was foreign to the town’s residents, for whom the nearby mountains are merely destinations for weekend excursions. When asked if the war touched Hacienda Vieja, village leaders shook their heads no. Only one woman, Maria Elena Rivera, had any firsthand experience of the war, and even her story was far from action-packed: One day a group of government soldiers had passed by her house and asked her for food, which she provided. After that, the soldiers continued on their way and never returned.

The town’s relatively peaceful history is unique in a country no bigger than the state of Massachusetts which nonetheless saw 25 percent of its population displaced in only a few years of conflict.

Elba Funes, a 27-year-old student political activist of no relation to the president or Yesenia, explained: “In Hacienda Vieja our politics come from our convictions, not from sentiment related to the war.”

In Hacienda Vieja, politics are passionate but tolerant. Though the largely FMLN town has a set of ARENA families, it has managed to avoid political violence without sacrificing its political enthusiasm. Elba’s mother Graciela, the oldest FMLN activist in the village, hung family pictures on her house walls alongside images of Che Guevara and Hugo Chávez. The corrugated metal of the latrine that faced the street had long displayed a red painted hammer and sickle to passersby. Graciela’s grandchildren Duvan, 10; Henri, 9; and Luis, 7, ran up to me and proudly showed me a photograph of them decked from head to toe with red FMLN paraphernalia at a rally where Mauricio Funes spoke.

Many from Hacienda Vieja participate in politics on a regional level. Elba Funes, for instance, worked the tables for the presidential elections. Sometimes regional politics even find their way into the village. Graciela talked angrily of election fraud in the recent January mayoral elections for the district, asserting that ARENA hired buses of Hondurans to come into the department to vote for their party. She went on to explain how, for this election, she and fellow FMLN activists blocked the highway from Honduras into the department. “No Hondurans were allowed to vote in our election this time,” she remarked with a smile.

Hope in El Salvador

Though Graciela is among the most active FMLN supporters in the village, many people share her hope that Mauricio Funes’ election will bring meaningful change to their village. As Elba explained, “Everyone’s expectations are very high. I certainly hope he fulfills our wishes. I think he will.” Much of the excitement surrounding Mauricio Funes’ election resembles the fervor that surrounded Barack Obama’s election in the United States. Many Funes slogans borrowed Obama’s favorite words: “hope” and “change.” There is a sense that a long overdue victory has arrived, inciting euphoria and anticipation for change. Elba’s voice was moving as she told me: “Emma, it’s just been so long. So, so long.”

Though hopes are high in little Hacienda Vieja, political commentators are unsure what to expect. Will Funes maintain his connections to Chávez? How will his social programs be funded?

Funes, for his part, has quelled ARENA-incited fears that he would take drastic populist measures like creating a new currency to replace the dollar. Rather, he has declared that his government would focus on strengthening relations within Central America and with the United States.

Uncertainty about the country’s future remains. At the very least, Funes’ election has brought symbolic change by shifting the balance of power away from an entrenched political party. But FMLN supporters like those in Hacienda Vieja want more. They want substantive change, and they want to see it in their own villages. Meeting even some of the expectations set for Funes by his enthusiastic supporters will take a monumental effort and extraordinary political skill. If Funes does not approach his work with the same energy with which his fans celebrated his victory, he will risk losing his base of support in villages like Hacienda Vieja. Without the backing of those like Graciela, he will be unable to stand up to the ARENA coalition in the legislative branch. The FMLN won on an irresistible promise of change. It must now prove that it can fulfill that promise.

Emma Vawter is a junior English major in Silliman College.