Legislative Elections in El Salvador: Even with “Radical Political Project” FMLN Doesn´t Carry the Day

March 19, 2012

by Alexandra Early

San Salvador - On March 11, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans headed to the polls in the first major contest between parties of the right and left since the leader of the latter, Mauricio Funes, was elected president three years ago.

Like mid-term congressional elections in the U.S., voting for municipal officials and national legislators in El Salvador often becomes a referendum on the popularity of incumbent chief executives (even if they’re not on the ballot). This year’s electioneering seemed to be just another fight between the two major parties, the ruling Frente Farabundo Marti para La Liberacion National (FMLN) and the conservative Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) as they vied for dominance of the billboards, newspapers, and air-waves of this nation. In the run up to the election, the right wing took advantage of friendly coverage in a mass media securely under the control of the Salvadoran 1%. There was more than the usual amount of sensationalistic reporting on street crime, gang violence and the country’s continuing economic problems, like high unemployment, which right-wing critics blame on the Funes government.

Voting in Cinquera, one of the sites observed by Sister Cities election observers

The current national government provides shoes, uniforms and school supplies to all elementary and middle school students and started literacy programs to reduce the 17 per cent illiteracy rate. It has invested in health clinics in the countryside and better hospital care in urban areas. And under Funes, struggling subsistence farmers have expanded access to loans and technical support.

Funes has disappointed some of his own supporters by not moving quickly enough to change the structural issues keeping people poor in El Salvador. Yet the FMLN is enough of a boogeyman to the right, here and in the U.S., to warrant alarmist commentary. In a February 24 piece for The Huffington Post, Joel D. Hirst, a current fellow at the George W. Bush Institute, claimed there was growing concern among “weary Salvadorans” because Funes and his party have put the pursuit of “their radical political project above representing the well-being of all the country’s six million people — a phenomenon that has occurred all too often in Latin America.”

Counting the ballots for the legislative election in Cinquera, Cabañas

If you are a Salvadoran millionaire used to evading taxes or the owner of a pharmaceutical company, perhaps some of the legislation passed recently could be seen as “radical” and frightening. In December, the FMLN pushed through major reforms to the extremely regressive Salvadoran tax system in which the poorest 10 per cent  of Salvadorans were paying 30 per cent  of their income in taxes while the richest 10 per cent paid only 11 per cent.

Under the new legislation, Salvadorans making less than $500 per month will pay no income taxes; those making more than $6200 a month will pay 30 per cent  income taxes and dividends paid to stockholders will be taxed at a 5 per cent rate. And in February, after nearly a decade of pressure from the social movement, the legislative assembly finally passed a law to regulate the prices of pharmaceuticals, which here are regularly marked up to 500 times higher than the price standards recommended by the World Health Organization.

Hirst went on to urge Salvadoran voters—not many of whom read HuffPo regularly– to “roundly reject foreign interference in their sovereign election process,” a reference to alleged political inroads being made by the government of Hugo Chavez, via a deal to sell gasoline at reduced rates in FMLN-controlled municipalities. However, Hirst was notably silent on that other “phenomenon that has occurred all too often in Latin America”—namely, U.S. efforts to influence election results and national government policy. In this area, Funes has fallen right in line, cooperating with the U.S. government’s war on drugs and crime and the human rights caught in the cross-fire.

Read full article at Counterpunch.org>>