by Kelly Mendenhall
Over the course of our studies in PLSC 390 in the summer of 2008 we talked a lot about where Latin America and El Salvador stood in comparison with the developed world: politically, economically; and where the region stands as far as healthcare and human rights are concerned. However, being that we were a group of students in the United States studying these issues from afar we didn’t have much of an opportunity to study the Salvadoran perspective on where El Salvador’s place in the world is today.
Upon arriving in country it occurred to me that I would like to know what the people of El Salvador thought and felt about where they, as a country and as individuals, fit into the world today. I wanted to know if Salvadorans felt that the civil war had a positive impact on the state of the nation or if it had only made things more complicated by leaving the country and its people in a state of disrepair – physically, as far as the country itself is concerned, and psychologically, as far as the people are concerned. In addition to all of this, I was curious to know how hopeful every-day Salvadorans are about the future of the country, especially with the Presidential elections coming up in March of 2009. Through readings and class discussions I had learned that it looks like the FMLN has a good chance of winning the presidency, and I wanted to know what Salvadorans thought this meant for their future.
For the purposes of this paper I will be mainly focusing on post-civil war El Salvador and the affects the war has had on the people and the political atmosphere of the country. While I will be citing as research some of the articles we read in PLSC 390, most of my research about where El Salvador is or might be headed will come directly from interactions with the people that our delegation worked with while in the country. I will begin with a discussion of the expectations I had and assumptions I’d made about El Salvador based on what I read, class discussion we had throughout PLSC 390 and follow up with how that compares to what Salvadorans had to say about their place in the world. I will conclude by discussing predictions I have about what will happen in El Salvador if the FMLN candidate does indeed win the presidency and how that compares with what the Salvadorans I spoke with stated as their hopes and expectations for an FMLN victory.
In order to understand the current socio-political situation in Latin America and, in this case, El Salvador, one must first understand the role that economics and the phenomenon of unequal distribution of wealth play in the region. Poverty in the region was definitely something we discussed in great detail throughout our course on campus prior to traveling to El Salvador. Poverty and the unequal distribution of wealth and land were two of the main driving forces behind the civil war that took place in El Salvador between 1980 and 1992. One of the sources we looked at in class was an article titled The Lopsided Continent: Inequality in Latin America, written by Kelly Hoffman and Miguel Angel Centeno. In Lopsided Continent Hoffman and Centeno painted of picture of the social structure in Latin America as follows:
· A “dominant class” consisting of 5% to 13% of the urban population, depending on the country… this class includes professional and small businessman, high-level bureaucrats, and the very small number in the commanding heights.
· The “petty-bourgeoisie” of small shopkeepers and entrepreneurs making up 7% to 11% of the urban population. (Hoffman, 372)
· A “formal proletariat”, consisting of 35% to 40% of urban populations, including those working in larger factories and the lower levels of public service.
· The “informal sector”, including 40% to 50% of the population, featuring owners of small illegal enterprises, workers in those enterprises, and the mass of street sellers and service providers with no security or protection.
In addition to the picture of Latin America painted in Lopsided Continent, it was also mentioned in class that about 95% of the wealth in El Salvador is in the hands of about 5% of the population, and that there are 14 families who have held most of the wealth and power in their hands for centuries.
With such a grim image portrayed for the majority of the population as far as distribution of wealth was concerned, I expected to see an extremely grisly reality upon entering El Salvador. I expected to see a repressed people – a people who were, in the majority, unhappy and downtrodden. I expected to see a place where sickness was everywhere and would be very visible, where the streets were so thick with street vendors that it would be difficult to drive or walk through. I expected to be surrounded by people with stories of woe and sadness.
In some cases, what I expected to find in El Salvador and what I saw matched fairly well, or at least in part. However, for the most part, there was a stark contrast between what I assumed to be true of the people of El Salvador and who they really were. What our group was greeted with from the moment we were in El Salvador was love and open arms – a sense of solidarity and family, bonds that would not and could not be broken easily. We came into contact with some of the most optimistic and hopeful people I have ever had the privilege of meeting, people who continued to fight to make their own lives and the lives of their fellow citizens better and brighter. We came into contact with every day people in communities of re-settlers who have completely rebuilt their lives since being refugees during the war; people who started artist co-ops to help their community, women’s advocacy groups, doctors who play roles in politics, and a woman who was (during the war) an FMLN revolutionary, and is now the director of the SHARE office in El Salvador; just to name a few. In short, people who lived in the most repressive circumstances I’ve ever witnessed, and yet refuse to be repressed, surrounded us every day.
One of the things I was most struck by while in El Salvador was the role of health care professionals in politics. On August 14, 2008 we met Dr. Benjamin Coello, an Internal Medicine doctor who is also a Professor of Medicine at the Evangelical University in El Salvador. The things that Dr. Coello told us about the healthcare situation in El Salvador did not surprise me, we had talked about them many times in class. He mentioned things like how about only 1.5% of the GDP in El Salvador being spent on public health annually (compared to about 20% in the US[1]) and that about 16% of the population of El Salvador lives on less than $1 a day. Like I said, these were not the things that surprised me. What did surprise me was that Dr. Coello spoke openly about his involvement with the FMLN and told us about the four main objectives held by himself and the FMLN in their plan for improved healthcare in El Salvador in the event that the FMLN wins presidential office. The objectives are as follows: To increase the percentage of GDP spent on public health annually to 3.5%; to develop a universal health care system (as opposed to the split public-private healthcare system now in place); to increase resources, equipment, and technology; and to increase of quality of care in the healthcare system.
Dr. Coello was not the only politically minded doctor that I came into contact with while in El Salvador. On August 15, 2008 our delegation was allowed to visit the Hospital Rosales, a public hospital in El Salvador. There we met Dr. Rodriguez-Funes, a woman and, like Dr. Coello, a Leftist supporter of the FMLN. It wasn’t until after we had toured the hospital and were in the privacy of the doctor’s office that we were able to sit down with her and ask her pressing questions, and I was surprised by her candid answers and frankness. She was blunt and didn’t sugar coat anything, and openly admitted to being involved with the FMLN party. She told us about the lack of medications in El Salvador and of her inability to serve enough of the people She told us that in a hospital where there were about 525 beds to be filled they saw about 800 patients per day. We saw for ourselves the hundreds of people sitting in outdoor waiting areas in the heat of August in El Salvador, and walked alongside her through the hallways packed full of patients and their families.
Again, I’d like to reiterate that the conditions in the hospital were shocking, but were not what stuck out in my mind at the end of the day – after all, we had talked plenty about the conditions of the healthcare system in El Salvador before ever entering the country. Like our discussion with Dr. Coello at the guesthouse the day before, what surprised me about Dr. Rodriguez-Funes and our conversation with her at the Hospital Rosales, was her passion about politics. It has been my personal experience in the US that most doctors stay out of politics – that most of the role that the medical field plays in politics involves the lobbying of prescription drug manufacturers for legislation in their favor, and an argument over availability of healthcare for the poor in the US. However, in El Salvador, the doctors (or at least the doctors we met that participate in the public health system) find themselves elbow deep in politics. They must fight for their patients in providing them with the best care they possibly can, and at least in their minds, by being involved with the political party and movement that they believe with benefit their patients the most. In El Salvador, for patients and their doctors, politics and healthcare are literally a matter of life and death for the majority of the country’s population.
I suppose it shouldn’t have been so shocking to me that doctors are so politically active in El Salvador, being that from the moment we arrived in country it was apparent that politics and the legacy of the civil war play a very prominent role in the every day lives of the people. Prior to leaving for El Salvador we had discussed in class that the FMLN presidential candidate, Mauricio Funes, has been leading in the polls for quite some time now and that it looks as if the FMLN is well on their way to victory in the 2009 presidential election. I expected, then, that there would be a certain level of political tension in El Salvador and that we may run into people on both sides of the political fence. What I did anticipate was how in-your-face the politics and campaigns would be. Everywhere we traveled in country there were ARENA colors painted on telephone poles, roadway guardrails, and cement walls along the street – almost anywhere there was open space. FMLN colors and graffiti appeared too, but were much more prevalent in the rural areas and countryside then they were in the city of San Salvador. From the look of the landscape, it wouldn’t seem apparent that the FMLN was leading in the poles, and I often wondered if it was the job of paid low-level government workers to go out and paint the town red, white, and blue.
The question that laid heaviest on my mind in the time I spent in El Salvador was what the people we were meeting and working with thought about the FMLN party and where the country would be headed if Mauricio Funes achieves victory in March. On August 14th our group of delegates met with Marina Peña, the director of SHARE El Salvador, and were given the opportunity to talk to her both about the history of El Salvador as well as the civil war that lasted from 1980-1992. I asked Marina what she thought the future would hold for her country if the FMLN win the presidency and she spoke of the United States. It is well-known that the United States doesn’t want a socialist government in power in any country in Latin America, especially one in which they have vested fiscal interests, and as was expected, Marina stated that the United States would be very unhappy if the FMLN were to win the presidency because it would make their plans for the country much more difficult. I asked Marina what she expected the United States’ reaction to be in such a case and she said, “If the FMLN wins, people must prepare themselves for instability.”
This same sentiment rang out in the community of Ita Maura, the community of re-settlers that we had the honor of staying with while we were in El Salvador. Ita Maura is filled with people who were displaced from their homes during the war and were refugees in different parts of the country and in Central America. The citizens of Ita Maura are a community of FMLN supporters who have literally had to build their lives together from nothing in the ruins of the civil war and fight for a better life together as a whole. On August 17 we sat down with the Community Directive Council of Ita Maura and talked with them about their lives and their hopes for the future. One of the student delegates asked the Council how they expected their community to be affected if the FMLN win the presidential election. The response from one of the men was this:
“We all support the FMLN; what ARENA has brought is not good enough; recently, prices have gone way up on goods; it takes 10 bags of fertilizers to fertilize two manzanas of land, and the price of these bags has recently doubled; the FMLN has helped our community with water, building the soccer field, helped us to get aluminum for the building of the church; if it’s this good on a municipal level, with an FMLN mayor in local office, it could only get better on a national level.”
A woman added: “It’s going to take a long time to recover from current problems like national debt before they even begin to make changes on a national level.” Like Marina, it seemed as though the woman sitting on the Directive Council has a more realistic viewpoint that while the FMLN will do the best they can to improve the situation in El Salvador, but they will be running into many roadblocks, both within and from outside of the country. The test will be whether or not the citizens of El Salvador can hold onto their patience long enough for the new government to become effectual.
In closing, I’d like to talk about what the implications of an FMLN victory could be, and how it could affect the citizens of El Salvador as far as the potential (as well as predictable and somewhat inevitable) involvement of the United States in the affairs of the country both before and after the election. As the economic situation stands now, somewhere between 700 and 900 people leave El Salvador every day to come to the United States in hopes of being able to work and survive here and send remittances home to their families to keep them afloat[2]. This amounts to about $3.6 billion in 2007 alone, which means that more than 17% of the country’s GDP came from remittances last year. El Salvador simply cannot survive without these monies, and the people of the country, as well as the administration, know it. According to some of the people we talked to while in country, the ARENA party is known for sending out flyers or letters informing people that if the FMLN wins the presidency the United States will stop the remittances from coming into El Salvador, causing economic collapse, and making it even more impossible for majority of the population in the country to survive. In my personal opinion, I don’t see that this is simply a scare tactic, but quite possibly a very real possibility in the future of El Salvador if the FMLN does come into power nationally.
In addition to the fear being instilled in the Salvadoran people about remittances and the potential collapse of the economy, there is also the issue of US military interference. It’s no secret to the people of El Salvador that the United States was dumping between $1 million and $1.5 million dollars worth of military aid into the country during the civil war[3]. In fact, it is believed that much of the reason why the FMLN has not won the presidential office in the past is that too many people are afraid to vote for a person who fought during the civil war or is too radical in their political views, because no one wants to live through another nightmare like they did for twelve years before. With a constant US military presence in El Salvador – a palatial US embassy as well as the ILEA (the US-El Salvador version of the School of the Americas) for instance, one doesn’t have to wonder much about whether or not Salvadorans are living in fear that the United States will once again rule their country in violence if an FMLN wins the presidential election in 2009.
So where does all of this leave El Salvador? Unfortunately for those whose interests are most vested in the outcomes, it’s almost impossible to predict what the future holds for the country whether the FMLN wins the presidency or not. If the presidency is won by ARENA, I’m sure it’s safe to assume that more of the same will continue in El Salvador. If Mauricio Funes is the victor, it will soon become apparent whether or not the FMLN are able to be to affect change in any meaningful way, or if the next several years will be spent attempting to clean up the mess of past, while fighting with the government of the United States over a claim to the future.
[1] Taken from www.nchc.org/facts/cost.shtml
[2] Taken from class notes from PLSC 390; discussion with Elly Jordan (Douglass)
[3] Taken from notes from class notes for PLSC 390, discussion with Richard Stahler-Sholk
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