Why the left won in El Salvador

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Pablo Rodriguez is a teacher at the City College of San Francisco and a founding member of the FMLN. A few days before the vote, he talked to Todd Chretien about what the election represented.


Mauricio Funes, a television journalist turned politician, became the symbol of another turn to the left in Latin American politics when he won El Salvador's presidential election March 15.

Funes, who took 51 percent of the vote, was the candidate of the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN), which led an armed struggle against a conservative government from 1980 to 1992. While Funes didn't participate in the fighting, he was accused by the incumbent ARENA party of involvement with "terrorism."

In fact, it is the U.S.-backed ARENA party--which contains fascist elements and right-wing death squads--that is steeped in blood. Following a 1992 peace deal between ARENA and the FMLN, a UN-sponsored truth commission found that of the 75,000 people killed during the civil war, the government was responsible for 85 percent of human rights violations.
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Economically, ARENA turned El Salvador into a laboratory for U.S.-dictated economic policies of privatizing government services and the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Today, some 37 percent of Salvadorans live in poverty, according to the World Bank.
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In the case of El Salvador, Reagan said he would send whatever the military government needed. Soon, El Salvador was receiving as much aid from the U.S. as Israel, even more. We became the Israel of Latin America. Between 1979 and 1982, we did overthrow the government, but the U.S. sent military aid and more military "advisors" to El Salvador than any other nation.

That was the only reason the government survived. The U.S. trained counterinsurgency special battalions in Panama and the U.S. Every month, 500 or 1,000 guys were coming back to El Salvador, trained to kill students and union members and peasants. That's why we were forced to go to the mountains.
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FULL ARTICLE
http://socialistworker.org/2009/03/17/why-left-won-in-el-salvador