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CIS
Colonia Libertad,
Avenida Bolívar # 103
San Salvador, El Salvador
Teléfonos:
(503) 2226-5362
(503) 2235-1330
e-mail: cis_elsalvador@yahoo.com
"Building Democracy After War," written by 2003 Election Observer John Foran, was published in The Independent in Santa Barbara, California. John Foran is a professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
This is not a story about Iraq and the unspeakably shameful U.S. actions leading up to and in this war. It is about another “distant” place, one where hope exists despite a U.S.-made war. Between March 9 and 18 I was in El Salvador, learning about the election process, being trained as an international observer, and finally, witnessing the elections for the 84-member National Assembly and all 262 municipal mayors and councils held on Sunday, March 16.
After suffering a traumatizing revolutionary civil war between 1979 and 1992 that pitted the leftist FMLN guerrilla forces against a repressive military regime funded heavily by the Reagan White House, the battlefield stalemate was resolved with peace accords that stipulated the FMLN would become a peaceful electoral force in exchange for fair elections, modest land reform, and efforts to rebuild the social fabric torn asunder by 75,000 deaths and hundreds of thousands of displaced villagers in a population of under five million. Elections were duly held in 1994, putting the right-wing ARENA party in power; in 1997 and 2000 the FMLN made gains to the point where they were the single-largest party in the Assembly, with 31 seats, and controlled the mayorships and councils of the largest cities, while ARENA held the presidency and legislative power in the Assembly.
I was part of a 140-strong international team of observers from sixteen countries, hosted by the progressive NGO CIS, the Center for Solidarity and Exchange. Due to the CIS’s contacts, we were able to hear the candidates of the major parties as well as visit rural communities and learn about the issues. I was assigned with three other observers to the small town of San Pedro de Perulapan, about one hour east of the capital, and spent three days there, hearing testimony about the housing problems unleashed by the devastating earthquake of 2001, about the lack of access to drinking water, and the need for better roads in this rural area ruled since 1994 by ARENA but in 2003 hotly contested by the FMLN.
What we saw on March 16, from 6 a.m. till the polls closed at 5 p.m. and the votes were counted for three more hours in front of us, was an exercise in democracy, a process that worked despite its complexities because the will to make it work was there. In a generally festive and respectful atmosphere, people came into the town to cast their ballots, ultimately electing the FMLN’s candidate as mayor and giving the party the most votes for the Assembly (due to the arcane system of allocating seats, ARENA and another much smaller right-wing party got the other two Assembly seats in the province).
What we didn’t see but had been trained to discern were the structural and political limits to the process as it currently stands: the people who never registered because the process is time-consuming and costly, who were too disillusioned by the parties or the system in general to come to the polls (about 40 percent vote in El Salvador), who were intimidated by the backdrop of violence in a two-month campaign where six activists, including FMLN candidates, were killed and others kidnapped, where votes were bought by the unscrupulous right-wing parties preying on people’s poverty, where two million Salvadorans who have had to leave the country to seek work and send home the dollars that keep their families and the economy afloat were disenfranchised, and where a system of “floating voters” permits parties to send their supporters to other communities to tip the outcome.
The political system is thus not equal, though the process is inspiring to witness. It was indeed a very wonderful experience -- imperfect, impressive, frustrating, and hopeful all at the same time. We often remarked that if the U.S. presidential elections had been conducted as cleanly in 2000 in Florida the world wouldn’t be in this mess. Where does it leave the people of El Salvador? With a process that is a journey toward an alternative – the very real possibility that one day the left will come to power democratically, as it has in Brazil and will sooner or later elsewhere in Latin America. And the prospect that what could not be won by force of arms at the height of the Cold War may yet be achieved through patient political organizing for change on the part of a population that has suffered much, seen both positive political and social change and further economic hardship, and still retains the dream of another world. I would urge all interested citizens of Santa Barbara to go one day to witness this process in El Salvador, and would be happy to put them in touch with the CIS in time for the presidential elections of March 2004. Meanwhile, the public is invited to attend the film Maria’s Story, about FMLN guerrilla Maria Navarrete, a peasant woman from Chalatenango elected to the Assembly in 1997. Maria will speak after the screening on Wednesday, April 2, from 4-6 p.m. in UCSB’s MultiCultural Center theater. Building a democracy after a war happens when the people affected by the war are the ones doing the building, and not those who inflicted it from the centers of power in the first place.