El Salvador is Poised to Break With the Past; Is the U.S. Ready to Change its Policy Toward Latin America?

A desire for change isn't a sentiment unique to voters in the United States, and it's not something that our country should fear when embraced by our Southern neighbors. El Salvador, a country that will hold presidential elections on March 15, is a case in point. It's a place where a single party has been in power for two decades. It has long been mired in poverty, crime, and corruption. And its own Cheneys and Rumsfelds remain in power. A victory by the progressive frontrunner in the electoral contest -- the first Latin American presidential elections since President Barack Obama's inauguration -- would give the new White House an opportunity to reject fear-mongering about the rise of left-leaning governments in Latin America and instead praise the regional wave of democratic transformation.

In recent months, Mauricio Funes of the progressive FMLN party (the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional) has consistently led in the polls. A February 20 poll reported Funes with an 11 percent edge over Rodrigo Ávila, a private security mogul, former director of the National Civil Police, and nominee of the right-wing ARENA party (the Alianza Republicana Nacionalista). Funes is well known in El Salvador as a television journalist who hosted one of the few programs openly critical of the government. He has capitalized on public support for new approaches to a crime epidemic and an economy that has provided too few alternatives to destitution or migration to the North. ARENA has held the presidency in El Salvador for the last 20 years, including the 17 years since the signing of the 1992 Peace Accords that ended the country's civil war.

A key tactic of the Salvadoran right has been to paint Funes and his party as tools of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Many U.S. commentators have mirrored this position by caricaturing the Latin American left as naively obedient to Chávez and encouraging Obama to craft a tougher response. Within the context of El Salvador, the accusation against Funes is baseless; in the United States, this simplistic reading of Latin American politics invites a wholly counterproductive approach to the region.

The Obama administration's policy toward Latin America should be based in a more sophisticated understanding of regional politics, respect for democratic processes, and acknowledgement of the profound failure of past U.S. interventions. El Salvador provides a clear example of a country in which both military and economic policies promoted by Washington under previous administrations have had disastrous results -- and it now offers an opportunity for the United States to express a new understanding of its national interest.

The Shadow of War

El Salvador's civil war still looms large both in the country's domestic politics and in its relations with the United States. Unfortunately, the record of U.S. involvement was systematically distorted by the Bush administration, creating a continued need for Americans to face a difficult history.

In the 1980s, El Salvador was the site of one of the United States' largest Cold War interventions. Tragically, Washington sent $6 billion in aid to a Salvadoran government whose army and paramilitary death squads were responsible for heinous crimes. Some 75,000 people were killed in the country's civil war during that decade. In 1993, a United Nations-backed Truth Commission determined that the government was responsible for 85 percent of human rights abuses and that the rebel forces were responsible 5 percent, with the remaining 10 percent undetermined. Among the most notorious acts of the right-wing counter-insurgency included the massacre of at least 1,000 people in the village of El Mozote in 1981 -- an atrocity the Reagan administration tried hard to obscure and deny -- and the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in 1980.