FMLN MAYORS IN 15 TOWNS
If the Salvadoran left is to build on its modest presence in local government in the next elections, it must construct a more equitable relationship with social movements and put local economic development above party militancy.
By Mario Lungo
The participation of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in last year’s general elections generated optimism and fear- depending upon whom you talked to. Most members and sympathizers of the former guerrilla front, many solidarity organizations and some progressive non-governmental organizations (NGOs) savored the possibility of a left victory. On the other hand. the more conservative sectors in the country and abroad shuddered at the thought that the left might win, roll back the reigning neoliberal logic of economic growth, and try to establish a revolutionary regime.
The electoral results brought more than a few surprises. At the national level, the FMLN emerged as the second most powerful political force in the country. The organization came away with an important share of power in the Legislative Assembly, despite its limited resources and political inexperience. At the municipal level, however, the left suffered an undeniable defeat, winning in only 15 mostly small municipalities. The FMLN did not win in as many towns as expected and lost in many in the former conflict zones where it had a considerable presence, provoking uneasiness and perplexity among the organization’s supporters.
These contradictory results, full of possibilities and obstacles, demonstrated what to many was already a certainty: the time needed to transform a group of armed organizations representing different political tendencies into a political party was significantly longer than the time that passed between the signing of the peace accords in January, 1992 and the elections in March, 1994.
The FMLN’s poor showing at the local level can also be explained in part by the profound changes that Salvadoran society experienced during the war years: on the political plane, the goveming ARENA party had converted itself into a modem party of the fight, leaving behind its extremist origins; on the economic plane, remittances, principally from family members in the United States, had cushioned in large part the negative effects of the war and the economic crisis of the 1980s.[1]
The left’s ambivalent attitude toward local government during the civil war no doubt hurt the FMLN at the ballot box last year as well. The armed struggle on behalf of the economically exploited and politically excluded implied the rejection of existing institutions, especially the municipal governments which served as key levers of political and social control over the population. This explains the expulsion campaign against right-wing mayors in the conflict zones that the FMLN carried out during the 1980s.
In a demonstration of its political maturity, the FMLN understood that the 1994 local elections were not simply a mechanism to politically co-opt the left. The organization did not intend to use municipal government simply as a soapbox to denounce wrongs, but as a means to acquire practical political experience and to contribute to the formulation of national policies, especially related to local development and decentralization. For many voters, however, this ambivalent attitude toward local political authority was never adequately explained by the FMLN in its electoral campaign.
After recovering front the initial shock of unexpected defeat, the FMLN focused its efforts on governing those towns and cities it had won. The left wanted not only to work on behalf of those who had voted for it but also to demonstrate to the population at large that it had the capacity to direct local development. This article explores the FMLN’s record to date at the helin of municipal government and the challenges that the organization will confront in the future.
It is important to situate the present moment in the context of the role that local governments have traditionally played in Salvadoran political history. As, in other Latin Arnerican countries, in EI Salvador the institution of local government has a long trajectory that served to prolong the Spanish colonial regime and permit caudillista-style political control over the population. Although El Salvador’s small size and relative ethnic homogeneity did not provide fertile ground for the development of strong regional differences, local governments have wielded significant political control since the nineteenth century. Municipalities have maintained this control despite the fact that during the modernizing era of the State in the 1950s, many functions (such as the provision of some services, the granting of permits, and the collection of certain taxes) were taken away from municipal governments and turned over to the central government, which managed them in many cases through autonomous institutions. This centralizing arrangement was embedded in an import-substitution model of economic growth.
Although economically and administratively weakened by the reforms of the 1950s, municipal governments continued being a key agent of social and political control. This control retained the authoritarian traits associated with the militarism that had predominated in the State and society at large since the 1932 popular-insurrection massacre. During the years of military dictatorship from 1931 until the early 1980s, control–at the municipal level–was wielded by the mayor, the military commander, and the priest.[2]
This trinity of power began to break down in the 1970s when an important sector of the Salvadoran Church became radicalized and took up the defense of the country’s poor. It definitively shattered during the civil war of the 1980s when the FMLN’s armed struggle ruptured local military structures and forced numerous mayors of municipalities in conflict zones to abandon their duties.
At the same time, however. the government of Christian Democrat José Napoleón Duarte (1994-1989) promoted the devolution of power to municipal governments by decreeing a municipal code in 1983. The new code assigned local governments significant new functions, although not the resources to carry them out. Starting in the mid-1980s, the United States–with an eye to counterinsurgency–financed local governments through the U.S.AID-funded CONARA program.[3] This municipal aid led to the resurgence of local governance in EI Salvador.
With the war’s end in 1992, municipal governments have been strengthened even further as a result of the process of decentralization. Decentralization is considered necessary not only for the democratization of the country but also for the new model of export-oriented economic growth which requires the existence of local governments that can carry out social-welfare programs that a pared-down central state apparatus can no longer assume. This paradox-laden process constitutes the immediate antecedent to the FMLN’s participation in local governments, and marks many of the limitations that the left has encountered.
The newly elected FMLN mayors were immediately confronted with the expectation of their supporters that the left would resolve their most pressing problems. This belief was grounded in the FMLN’s standing as an opposition force and an alternative to the traditional parties which had been won not in the political arena, but in the battlefield. These high expectations were translated into demands that the FMLN simply could not satisfy, given the inexperience of its candidates and the limited resources at their disposal. To address the problem of political inexperience, various progressive NGOs funded rapid seminars and training courses on the municipal question. It has become clear, however. that this kind of expertise cannot be acquired overnight.
Various progressive NGOs hoped the FMLN mayoralties would provide an opportunity to promote democratization and human development, in particular through increasing citizen participation in local government. The left has made modest advances in this area. Perhaps the greatest attempt at coordination between government and civil society can be found in Tecoluca in the department of San Vincente, one of the most significant FMLN mayoralties because of the municipality’s reach, its location, and its economic importance. The municipal government in Tecoluca created a Committee of Municipal Development to coordinate the different governmental and non-governmental institutions in the municipality, and is also trying to link up with changes at the national level.
One of the institutions with which the mayor is coordinating his efforts is the Sectoral Economic System (SES) in Tecoluca’s southern zone. The SES is a regional organization that links NGOs working in the area with tire Rural Development Corporation (CDR), a union that represents 14 repopulated communities. Orignally, it was an exclusively economic organization, but since 1995 it has become involved in social development. A key factor in the success of the SES in Tecoluca has been the presence of few external actors (NGOs mainly), all of which work closely together. By contrast, in the municipalities of Chalatenango and Morazán, also governed by the left, the large number of external actors work in an uncoordinated and fragmentary fashion.[4]
NGOs have not embraced the leftist mayors en masse, reflecting the extreme atomization of the NGO community in EI Salvador. Those NGOs that are closely linked to the particular FMLN tendency to which the elected mayor belongs have tried to coordinate their work with the municipality, but the response of other NGOs–whether independent, or aligned with different political tendencies or parties–has been heterogeneous.
Some FMLN municipal administrations have also made modest steps towards playing a more active role in economic development. One of the greatest efforts in that direction was the creation of a municipal coordinating body by the mayor of Suchitoto. This body attempts to bring together the widest-possible spectrum of organizations from civil society and the government to produce a local development plan.
The FMLN mayors consider their greatest obstacles to be fundamentally economic. Most municipalities must make do with scarce resources because local tax collection is minimal and the central government transfers so little money–only 0.2% of its budget is ear-marked for local governments. On top of this, the left has been harmed by the uneven distribution of this money. The capital city of San Salvador alone absorbs close to 40%. and for political reasons, transfers to municipalities where the FMLN won have been limited. One case in point is Nejapa, recently included in the metropolitan area of San Salvador. Nejapa’s mayor claims that the neighboring municipalities of Apopa and Quetzaltepeque, won by ARENA, have received important economic support from the central government, while his own municipality has been denied such revenue.
Several municipalities won by the FMLN have received significant support from the international community, both governmental and non- governmental. This international aid has not, however, always contributed to better municipal management by the left. In Meanguera, where an FMLN candidate from the People’s Expression of Renewal (ERP) won, significant aid has been channelled to Segundo Montes, a settlement created for repatriated refugees before the end of are conflict. The mayor, who resides in Segundo Montes and not in Meanguera, is confronted with the problem that she cannot charge taxes for government services since the infrastructure belongs to the Segundo Montes community. This state of affairs has aggravated the already precarious financial state of the municipality. Paradoxically, the mayor has been able to cooperate with neighboring municipalities won by ARENA in order to improve the highway that all the communities use.
The FMLN mayors have also had to contend with the unforeseen difficulties arising from the organization’s division (two of the five founding groups, one of them led by Joaquín Villalobos, left the organization in December), and the complex process of political recomposition that is underway right now.[5] This turn of events has created unprecedented challenges for the FMLN’s very political existence.
In spite of the fact that the FMLN has not held local office for very long, some initial lessons can be drawn froin its experience to date. First, if the FMLN is to construct a genuinely democratic municipal policy. it will have to reexamine how it relates to the various social sectors with which it was closely linked in the past, such as unions and social movements. The type of relationship that existed before and during the conflict was characterized by the verticality of decision-making. With the FMLN’s transformation from guerrilla front to political party, a more equitable relationship with the social sectors needs to evolve.
Moreover, the left must rethink the role of municipal government, moving beyond the functions assigned to it by the 1983 Municipal Code. Especially in small towns in agricultural areas, local governments should play an active role in economic development. Although the provision of services such as water, sanitation and energy are key, local governments should not restrict themselves to being “efficient service providers” as neoliberal ideology would have it. Rather, they should be an authentic expression of local self-rule that links the State and civil society. This has not yet been fully achieved, despite some efforts in this direction by FMLN municipal governments.
The FMLN must also address the current state of fragmentation among the various actors who participate in local political life. Local government must coordinate its actions with the central government, the NGOs, and the social movements and organizations in the community, as well as with the neighboring municipalities with which it makes up regional units. The municipalities governed by the FMLN have had little success working closely with local social movements since the spheres of action of the two do not necessarily coincide and social movements have little experience thinking territorially. On top of that, social movements may be reluctant to join forces with local government–even those controlled by the left–given their negative memory of the political control that this level of government wielded in previous decades.
FMLN municipal governments have also been criticized for being more concerned with militancy and strengthening party structures than with encouraging local development. Given that the first year of govemment has been marked by the division and recomposition of the left, the existence of this tendency is understandable. Nevertheless, if the left is serious about promoting democratic forms of governance at the local level, it must acknowledge that strong social movements and organizations are more important than strong party structures.[6]
The immediate obstacle that the FMLN faces is lack of time. The clock is ticking down for the left to familiarize itself with the local reality, to find innovative solutions to the day-to-day problems of its supporters, and to promote a more active, democratic citizenry. It it cannot do this, the FMLN runs the risk of seeing its already reduced presence in local government shrink even further in the next elections.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Mario Longo is a researcher at the National Foundation for Development (FUNDE) in San Salvador, and teaches at the Central American University “José Simeon Cañas.” Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
NOTES 1. Mario Lungo, El Salvador en los 80s: Contrainsurgencia y revoloción (San José, Costa Rica: FLACSO/EDUCA, 1990). See also Mario Lungo, “Explorando el lado oculto de los resultados electorales de 1994 en EI Salvador,” in Realidad, No. 40 (July/August, 1994), UCA, San Salvador. 2. No research has been done in EI Salvador concerning the constitutlon of local political power. Neither have any studies been done about how the FVILN relates to the different expressions of local power. 3. The National Commission of Restoration of Areas (CONARA) began its activities in the conflict zones in the department of San Vicente in 1983. Since 1992, this support has been transferred to the program “Municipalities in Action,” carried out by the Secretariat of National Reconstruction. 4. This situation is reminiscient of what occurred in the barriadas of Lima, which is discussed in Alfredo Rodríguez and Gustavo Riofrio, De invasores a invadidos(Buenos Aires: SIAP, 1972). 5. Of the five organizations that originally made up the FMLN–the Popular Liberation Forces (FLP), the Communist Party (PC), the Central American Revolutionary Workers Party (PRTC), the People’s Expression of Renewal (ERF, originally the People’s Revolutionary Army, with the same initials) and the National Resistance (RN)–the first three remain. The latter two pulled out of the FMLN to form, together with a small social-democratic group, the new Democratic Party. 6. Elsewhere, I have argued that the significant political capital that the FMILN had during the war–its strong party organizations has turned into one of the main obstacles in the way of its reconversion into a modern party of the left. See Mario Lungo, “Los obstáculos a la democratización en EI Salvador,” in J Barbar, ed., Democracia Hoy (San Salvador: ISTMO Editores, 1993).
