Mauricio Funes: a welcome change for El Salvador

“Yes we can!” Does this sound familiar? This is the campaign slogan El Salvador’s leftist candidate, Mauricio Funes, used this slogan to take his party, Faribundo Marti National Liberation (FMNL), to the party’s first victory since 1980.

With Soviet styled-music, red banners, and olive fatigues, ardent leftist patriots flooded the streets of San Salvador, as “Mauricio” led citizens with the motto: “a safe change.”

This marked a chapter in El Salvador’s political history, as President-elect Mauricio Funes took the stand as the first president from an opposing party to win an election since 1980. After an astounding win in 2004 for current president Antonio Saca, Rodrigo Avila and the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) retired their wins for a loss in the 2008-09 election.

“My government will be moved by a spirit of national unity,” Funes told supporters on Sunday night, after a stunning victory, “this demands that from now, from this very instant, confrontation, revenge must be put to one side.” In addition, his rightist and centrist opponents have agreed collaborate, as long as Funes does not feel the pressure from within FMNL to become more extreme.

Funes’s plans for the country are simple: Cutting down fraud, bribes and corruption to redistribute money into education will make El Salvador a fairer and less violent country. Regardless of the bipartisan collaboration, Funes will take the socialist approach to his nation’s politics; not using Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez or Cuba’s Fidel Castro as his model, but Brazil’s Luiz Ignacio “Lula” da Silva to sculpt his nation’s government.

“The atmosphere was wonderful!” said Mme. Mireille Luc after a recent visit to monitor El Salvador’s elections. “Entire families, dressed in Mauricio’s colors started coming at 7AM.”
Mme. Luc lived in El Salvador in the 1970s, when she taught French at the National University as an exchange student. “I hadn’t been back since then,” she said describing her reasons to return to the country.

The “CIS” organization joined with the Meridian Center, local organizations promoting democracy and solidarity, worked exclusively with El Salvador to fight their current corrupt state. There, Mme. Luc and seven young professionals had intensive training about El Salvador’s culture, government, and electoral system.

There, Mme. Luc and the group monitored the complicated Salvadorian electoral system, preventing people from showing ballots, eliminating pressure, and attempting to reduce fraud.

“A lot of things are wrong in El Salvador and the government has done nothing”. In her training, Mme Luc was given several statistics regarding the Salvadorian corruption. “5-700 people leave El Salvador everyday because of the hopeless situation at home; there are 2.5 million Salvadorians in the United States.”

In addition, El Salvador earns 18% of their income from Salvadorians sending money home. Of the country’s total income, only 5% of the national budget is spent in education; being the lowest in South America.

But, where does this money go? To the military, of course! Proportionally, El Salvador currently has the highest military budget in all of South America including the highest death rate with their current deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“As if El Salvador could afford to send people to Iraq when they can’t even afford education for their own people.” Mme. Luc added that “there was not violence on Sunday [day of the election] in a notoriously violent country.”

People have found their change in a historically rightist country when the opposition continued to gain momentum, after ARENA deployed their scare tactics. Rumors such as: “relatives in the US cannot send money home” or “Funes will nationalize the country and confiscate your home, car, etc.”

Regardless, Funes took the country by storm with an astounding win. “I think the day they keep their promises, El Salvador will have less fraud, “ she concluded. “Yes we can!” and yes, they did.