Tiny El Salvador, the size of Massachusetts, has become a crucial factor in Hugo Chavez’s expansion plans — and in the push by drug lords to find ever-more-secure routes from Colombia and Ecuador to the lucrative U.S. market. Unnoticed by most, the country’s current electoral contests have become key battlegrounds in both these struggles.
It is difficult to exaggerate the failure of the Bush administration to pay heed to a host of threatening issues throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. From ignoring the slide of Mexico into drug-gang violence to failing to pass free-trade agreements with Colombia and Panama, the White House (with Congress’s help) has lost the respect of all segments of the region’s society. It has ceded country after country to Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian” socialist revolution.
El Salvador is the last right-of-center government in Central America. Though the smallest in the region, the country contains some six million inhabitants and has risen from a wantonly destructive civil war to become, with Panama and Costa Rica, a stabilizing force, in contrast to the faltering Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.
Legislative and municipal elections this coming January, and the presidential elections in March, will pit the FMLN (Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front) against the long-ruling ARENA (Republican Nationalist Alliance) — these elections have effectively become a referenda on Hugo Chavez’s control of Latin America’s political future. An FMLN victory would complete a socialist line from Ecuador through Central America to Mexico. The linkage would create a virtual superhighway for narcotics shipments to North America, even though the Pan American Highway remains incomplete by some 60 kilometers.
Narcotics have historically made their way to the United States with a certain amount of difficulty. The majority are flown from clandestine points in Colombia and Ecuador to Mexico, and then smuggled through a web of tunnels across the border. Other shipments arrive via air at clandestine U.S. landing strips, or come on ships, packaged in containers that slip through screening at U.S. ports.
The U.S. Coast Guard recently estimated that 175 tons of cocaine — 17 percent of U.S. consumption — was launched during 2007 from the Venezuelan town of Apure and transshipped, via the Dominican Republic, to the United States. This flew in the face of Venezuelan pleas of innocence, and confirmed that Chavez and his cohorts were involved financially and logistically. (Following their July 10 reconciliation summit, Hugo Chavez told the press he had asked Colombian counterpart, Alvaro Uribe, to help him combat drug trafficking.)
To date, it has been hard to get cocaine through El Salvador — and the country has been a staunch ally of the United States, even stationing troops in Iraq. Were Mauricio Funes and the FMLN to rule El Salvador, the country would immediately fall under Chavez’s influence. Costa Rica and Panama already present minimal challenge to narco-traffickers, so the land route from Colombia to the United States would be open and efficient.
THE RACE
The FMLN has put forward a well-known television personality, Mauricio Funes, as its presidential standard bearer. Funes has sought to overcome FMLN’s revolutionary reputation, but it is proving difficult.
Funes has tried to keep his running mate, Salvador Sanchez Ceren, out of the public eye. For good reason: Sanchez Ceren was an FMLN commanding general during the 1982-92 civil war, and particularly brutal aspects of his terrorist career are coming to light.
Also, it is an open secret that Hugo Chavez has made significant financial contributions to the FMLN campaign,. A recent poll reports that 86 percent of Salvadoreños are opposed to a government closely aligned to the Venezuelan dictator.
As recently as June, polls showed FMLN leading ARENA by 20 points or more. A mix of mistakes by the FMLN and the coming together of previously contesting ARENA factions has cut the difference to just four points, and ARENA leaders express confidence they will overtake the opposing ticket in the weeks ahead.
Most confident of all is Rodrigo Avila, ARENA’s presidential candidate. Soft-spoken and unpretentious, Avila served for ten years in the country’s National Civil Police force (with 20,000 employees the country’s largest enterprise, public or private). As chief for eight years, Avila had a reputation for incorruptibility and an appetite for taking the lead in dangerous situations.
Rodrigo Avila agrees that his candidacy is not typical, but he is determined to bring fresh approaches both to campaigning and to solving the country’s many challenges.
Avila is at his best campaigning one-on-one and speaking before live groups — the day we talked, he had shaken hands and chatted with some 1,200 voters and taken Polaroid photos with more than 700 of them. He told me:
I have neither the training nor the inclination to be a media star. I like to move among voters and talk with them, and they seem to like it, as well.
We have a clear understanding of the issues facing the country — health care, education, work opportunities, security, and the environment. We have programs that address each of them, and I discuss them every day.
But I also believe we must focus on something not normally mentioned — values. It may not be the usual thing to do, but today it is especially critical.
Like most countries in the region, El Salvador suffers from corruption throughout government and the private sector. Corruption is more than morally wrong; it is bad business, because it greatly inhibits economic growth. Every private dollar that is spent illegally — immorally — is a dollar that is not invested in building a business, in training a worker, in paying his or her salary. Every government dollar that is not wasted can be invested in schools, medical dispensaries, security, and the environment.
Our country has recovered remarkably well since the civil-war years. We have rebuilt our infrastructure and are considered one of the most business-friendly countries in the hemisphere. We have the lowest poverty rate in Central America, 30 percent compared to about 45 in Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua — but that is still much too high.
A STORY TO TELL
An Avila commitment should be taken seriously. In the closing months of the civil war, at 30 the country’s youngest police chief, he was involved in 23 lethal interactions with diehard guerrilleros and wounded twice in the process. He showed similar grit in urban encounters, once singlehandedly overpowering a team of armed intruders who had robbed and were threatening to rape a lone woman in her garden.
By the time he attended the FBI academy in Quantico, Va., Avila found it largely redundant to the broad range of challenges his police career had provided. Asked how this kind of background, plus ten years as a business executive, prepared him for the presidency, he said, “I’m not sure if leading men under fire or managing the country’s largest workforce or running a business is the most important, but I am certain that, together, they have provided me the tools to do the job.”
Avila confesses to only one problem: “Celina, my wife, is a well-trained business executive, involved in many civic activities and a great campaigner.” He adds with a wink, “If she weren’t my wife, I could name her as my running mate.”
Rodrigo Avila brings an innovative, relaxed style to El Salvador’s political life that has so far confounded FMLN militants. If he holds to form, El Salvador’s former top cop stands a solid chance of breaking the string of Chavez-backed victories (Argentina, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Paraguay) that present such an enormous challenge to freedom in the region.
More, however, is needed. A new administration and Congress in Washington must place Latin America solidly on the foreign-policy agenda and take specific steps to deal with the narcotics challenge; with Napoleonic Hugo Chavez; and with the unspeakably threatening crisis that builds daily in Mexico.
Even if Rodrigo Avila and ARENA prevail in El Salvador’s coming elections, they cannot win the regional battle by themselves. It is long past time for Washington to show solid support for its friends, to woo effectively the undecideds, and to isolate our opponents.
– John R. Thomson has analyzed political trends in developing countries for four decades. He welcomes comments at thomson.john.r@gmail.com.