Free elections are dangerous

[EFerrari]

So, I’ve been researching a massacre in El Salvador in 1932 that my grandfather was intimately involved in. I found out about it by googling his name one very bored night. And, it all went back to an election. I’m not sure what I make of it all yet but, here goes.

When El Salvador became an independent entity, there was a great deal of civil unrest until they started staging elections. Things calmed down after that.

Then, in 1931, the incumbent – who was something of a philosopher and somewhat off of the reservation decided to hold a real election. He didn’t choose a successor. The coffee barons and the bankers and the military were horrified but, they mostly watched to see how things would turn out.

The people elected, as far as I can tell, their choice AND he was seated. A moderate who had the misfortune to have the coffee market collapse on his watch.

Things got very bad. Everyone was losing money, everyone. The country defaulted on loans. The indigenous people who harvested the coffee couldn’t live on the reduced wages – as if there was anything to reduce from.

This moderate was removed by a military coup – because no one seemed to understand that he couldn’t by himself fix the coffee market and because the ruling elite weren’t comfortable with real elections and real representative government.

In any case, the moderate was gone and a general was put in his place. (My grandfather worked under this man.)

But, there’s more. The next year, the country was to elect its mayors and reps – much like our 2006 elections.

This is the thing: In 1931, El Salvador’s people elected a majority of socialist and communist candidates. First time in this hemisphere. And NONE of them were seated. The election results were discounted, suspended or overruled. Not one of the people’s choices was seated.

So, all hell broke loose. And it broke loose exactly against the numerical majority but the culturally despised: against the worker’s movement that was mostly indigenous people, mostly from the Pipil people.

(I have to tell you something about El Salvador. Even within one family unit, the darkest child is reviled. “Indian” blood is – or was – reviled. The favored child was the lightest child. Talk about the hegemony of the oppressed. . )

This was the last straw. The people planned a revolt and the date was known to the government. But, the government didn’t seem to believe that the ragged masses would actually stand up for themselves.

Ambassadors from various groups representing the people met with the government, tried to warn them, we’re barely holding things down here. You need to pay attention.

No attention was forthcoming.

On schedule, there was a workers' revolt that was as awful as possible. Mobs stormed the western cities. They cut the telegraph lines, stormed the mayoral offices and the local military authority. People were raped and tortured and killed.

Because the elected candidates were not seated. That’s what happened. Historians say that about 100 people died in those attacks but I don’t believe them. The number is being suppressed. All you have to do is look at the number of western cities involved and the size of the crowds and that number becomes ridiculous. It was probably closer to 2000. And that’s the least of it.

It was all bound up in racism – that great greaser of repressive regimes.

“We need to cleanse the hills of Indians.”

. . . .

In response, the ruling elite managed to save their day. They deployed all their resources against the rebels. The estimate is that .7% of the total population of El Salvador was murdered during the “pacification”.

Free elections are dangerous.

That’s what we’re up against in reality. We may hold the belief that because we are “Americans” we are inoculated against consequences. That we are somehow more evolved than the Latin American countries our government has done its best to control at a massive cost to human life.

It is this fiction, this belief in our magical inoculation that hampers us. A rigged election is a rigged election, whether it is rigged by a general in El Salvador or by the Mayberry genius. There will be consequences.

And like El Salvador at that time and like Germany a few years later, like Rwanda, the party that harvests racists AND controls the vote will visit destruction on us all.

There will be consequences.