On the night of March 4, when President Nayib Bukele was preparing to celebrate a new electoral victory by achieving, together with his allies, control of the majority of municipalities in El Salvador, the controversial president also scored a more personal triumph: the collapse of the FMLN, the former Salvadoran guerrilla that suffered its worst political defeat since the arrival of democracy.
Bukele has worked since his first term to eliminate the left-wing organization, of which he was a part and represents for him a very heavy past, and he has made great progress in that endeavor.
The Front did not win a single municipality in the municipal elections at the beginning of March and has been left out of the Legislative Assembly, the Salvadoran parliamentary body.
A hard blow for an organization that once moved the sympathies of half the world for its fight against the military tyranny that overwhelmed Salvadorans and that, after the peace agreements at the beginning of the nineties, was reconverted into a political party, laying down their arms for the electoral ballots.
The Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) was created in the early 1980s to bring together the different political-insurgent factions that fought against the Salvadoran Army in a bloody internal war that left more than 75,000 dead.
Left-wing groups had taken up arms to overthrow military-style governments that responded to the interests of a conservative and backward oligarchy that feared a Cuban-style revolution.
The Salvadoran guerrillas had the sympathy of Fidel Castro's Cuba, which trained them and helped finance them, while Washington pressed to avoid the insurgent triumph at all costs.
The fear was that the guerrillas would come to power as had happened with the FSLN in Nicaragua and the leftist propaganda sang that “if Nicaragua won, El Salvador will win.”
The Chapultepec Peace Accords, signed on January 16, 1992 in Mexico City, marked a political change in El Salvador, ending more than a decade of civil war and beginning the path to strengthening an electoral democracy.
The FMLN laid down its arms and became the main left-wing political force, and in June 2009 it achieved its greatest political victory when it came to power for the first time at the hands of Mauricio Funes, a 49-year-old journalist who represented the hopes of change in a country hit by inequality and violence sown by the so-called maras, the gangs that practically controlled the territory.
Salvadoran soldiers rest before fighting armed guerrillas of the People's Revolutionary Army, in the province of San Miguel, in August 1983.Robert Nickelsberg (Getty Images)
Funes was followed in the Government by former guerrilla Salvador Sánchez Cerén, one of the main leaders of the Front, a tireless politician who awakened the old fears of the business and conservative class.
Both leftist governments failed to put an end to violence and poverty and are rather remembered for high levels of corruption and the flight of the two former presidents from the country: Cerén and Funes sought refuge in Nicaragua that had become the dictatorship of Daniel Ortega.
“The FMLN made an agreement with dark figures in the country's politics to be able to govern.
Also with characters accused of corruption, organized crime and drug trafficking.
Furthermore, his political project did not provide solutions up to what people who declared themselves left expected, which caused strong disenchantment among citizens,” explains Salvadoran analyst César Artiaga.
“People felt that revolutionary principles and leftist values were progressively betrayed by the party leadership,” he adds.
The discontent of the electorate over the corruption of FMLN, but also of the right-wing Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA), the two parties that shared power in the country for 25 years, created the bases for Bukele to take over in the presidential elections of 2019. The young president, who sells himself as a modern, efficient and friendly man, who moves the masses through his effective use of social networks, had among his objectives to eliminate the old Front.
Bukele was part of that party in his beginnings as a politician and under its wing he managed to win the mayoralty of San Salvador, the capital.
“Bukele's story is a story of opportunism,” says analyst Artiaga.
“His connection to the Front was never because he was a left-wing person, in reality he has always been very conservative, but he saw in the FMLN the opportunity to carry out his ambition of being president,” he adds.
Artiaga recalls that Bukele's family has had “a historical relationship” with the Front and they financed the guerrilla at the time.
“When he achieved very strong political capital, and knowing that he could not run as a presidential candidate for the FMLN, Bukele caused a break with the party so that it would expel him and thus create his political movement,” says Artiaga. .
Bukele began his
vendetta
by attacking the peace agreements that gave political legitimacy to the FMLN, calling them a “farce,” a “business” of elites and a “pact between the corrupt.”
The president refused to commemorate the signing of the agreements and ordered by decree announced by the then Twitter that that date would become a day to remember the victims of the armed conflict.
“What Bukele did was blame the problems on a political event that for Latin American and Central American democrats is almost sacred, which are the Agreements.
In Central America, the enemy that populists point to are precisely those pacts, which they call agreements between elites that do not allow entry to new actors who could presumably solve the country's problems.
And Bukele, with his attitude and his way of presenting himself, embodies the possibility of a future that Salvadorans did not find,” explained Harry Brown, doctor in Political Science from the Complutense University of Madrid and co-author of
Populism in Central America
( XXI century).
Nayib Bukele delivers his inauguration speech in Plaza Barrios in San Salvador, in June 2019. Above him, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, the outgoing president, and members of his cabinet.
Salvador Melendez (AP)
Later, Bukele's guns were focused on the Front, which he attacked for corruption and the inability to solve the country's problems.
“Disappearing the FMLN has to do with his ego, with the idea of erasing that past that links him to a left-wing party and saying that he has taken it upon himself to bury that past that, according to him, has done so much damage to the country” explains analyst Artiaga.
His message resonated deeply with the Salvadoran electorate and the Front has lost tens of thousands of votes and has gone from having the support of 33% of the electorate in 2009 to having the favor of just 7% since 2019.
Does the FMLN have possibilities within Salvadoran political life?
Artiaga believes so.
The analyst describes as “very clumsy” Bukele's claim that by ending the Front he also strikes down the Salvadoran left.
“The left is represented in social, environmental, and feminist movements that end up being a guarantee in the defense of human, institutional, and constitutional rights,” says Artiaga.
As for the FMLN, this analyst considers that the party has a new opportunity to restructure internally, with the election of new leadership.
Artiaga points to party figures such as deputy Anabel Belloso, who can impose a change of course.
Neither Belloso nor other FMLN representatives wanted to give interviews for this report.
“There are leaders who can rescue the revolutionary principles of the party.
Their electoral defeats are a strong blow and if they do not understand the message in the short term, I believe they face the threat of disappearing,” warns Artiaga.
“It is a historic opportunity,” he says.
A protester at a New Ideas party rally carries fake coffins to represent the death of the FMLN, PDC and ARENA parties, in San Salvador, in 2021. FRED RAMOS
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