Polls on the March 15 presidential vote show the election will likely open a new progressive chapter in El Salvador's long, violent history of war and dictatorships with a victory by the left-wing Farabundo Marti Front for National Liberation (FMLN), which is promising to build a people-centred government.
But the right is not taking its impending defeat lightly; it has been orchestrating a massive fear campaign and has worked feverishly to secure corporate-driven development contracts before its rule is set to expire.
A victory in the elections for the FMLN candidate Mauricio Funes, and his running mate Salvador Sanchez Cersn, seems imminent. Despite a dirty campaign against the left, rampant fraud from the right and heavy police presence at the polls in legislative and municipal elections on January 18, 2009, voters made the FMLN the strongest political force in the country.
The FMLN's path towards power, involving a transition from peasant revolt to major political party, has been made possible by the mass struggle of unions, students, campesinos, vendors and migrants.
On the electoral front, Funes has maintained solid backing from El Salvador's broad-based social movements, and the party has found new key support from a sizable Salvadoran immigrant community in the US.
Also rallying to Funes's side are rural communities and small and middle-sized business sectors in El Salvador that are outraged with the ruling Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) party's economic policies and systematic siphoning of public resources.
Arena has tried to divide support for the FMLN by portraying a criminal image of the party and attributing its rising popularity to Funes, a journalist who critics call a "political moderate who only serves for the photos".
But the FMLN's current popularity is not an isolated phenomenon and Funes isn't the anomaly the right would like us to believe.
It is true that Funes's candidacy has strengthened the FMLN's chances of winning. His 20 years of investigative journalism and his popular morning news show, The Interview, which provided a forum for the public to challenge the government's actions and official reporting, has given millions of Salvadorans a wide-open view into his politics.
It is also true that the FMLN's current popularity is very much in line with increasing electoral gains the party has made in past elections.
In 1994, the first year it competed in elections after the peace accords that ended the civil war between it and the military dictatorship, the FMLN earned 12 mayoral seats and 22 legislative deputies; in the presidential elections of 1994, 1999 and 2004, the FMLN earned 32%, 29% and 37% of the vote, respectively.
The 2006 mid-term elections marked a turning point for the party as it closed an enormous gap in voter turnout and won the election with 943,936 votes to Arena's 854,166. By that time, the FMLN was governing over 40% of the total population of El Salvador at the municipal level.
Today, the party has 96 mayoral offices — governing 60% of the population — and the most deputies of any single party in the legislative National Assembly, holding 35 of 84 seats.
However, financial exclusion and major news media blackouts have helped negate the FMLN's popular support. Right-wing ownership of mainstream media has made it practically impossible for the left to fully participate in the established political structure.
'The El Salvador we want'
The FMLN's political project is outlined by 10 central principles of action:
1. Overcome unemployment, the high cost of living, poverty, exclusion and inequality in the distribution of benefits and costs of development.
2. Exceed the slow growth of the economy by accelerating and diversifying the country's production of resources.
3. Overcome the insecurity of the population and state impunity. Defeat delinquency and organised crime. Overcome violence and the damage to norms of social coexistence.
4. Overcome exclusion and inequality in the access to knowledge and reduce the gap of knowledge, science, technology, and information that distances our country from highly developed countries.
5. Clean up public finances, ending incompetence and irresponsibility in the handling of public money that precipitated the financial crisis. Overcome the lack of political will and reach an accord that opens a passage for the integral fiscal reform that El Salvador needs.
6. Confront the effects provoked by the global economic crisis: agricultural insecurity, energy vulnerability, consequences of climate change and the local effects of the US recession.
7. Unify the country: dismantle the foundations of intolerance, polarisation and a fractured economy.
8. Remove the obstacles to democracy and fully implement the peace accords.
9. Overcome the fragility, deterioration and degradation of state institutions with legal security for people, families and the life of the country.
10. Overcome regional fragmentation and the lack of integration that has impoverished and disadvantaged people in this part of the world. Move forward toward Latin American integration in the interests of the people.
Evidence of the FMLN's popularity is not hard to find. It can be glimpsed in massive attendance at rallies and in the results of the first round of elections.
Electoral opinion polls consistently show the FMLN has the plan that voters want — putting the government to work for the Salvadoran people.
According to the Arena government, the FMLN is making promises it cannot keep and its electoral campaign is only a smokescreen for its true ambition: Creating "armed groups" of children in the Salvadoran countryside to fight alongside Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Hezbollah, Colombian guerrillas and street gangs to overthrow the US empire.
This gem of fiction makes one wonder what ideas must have been scrapped in Arena's campaign strategy meetings.
Who's afraid of the people?
Given the public's deep opposition to some of its cornerstone policies, such as the repressive Mano Dura ("Iron Fist") policing program or the privatisation of public resources, Arena would need a dramatic about face to turn the election in its favour.
Arena would have to start by pulling back on its national water privatisation plan, signing public water provision agreements with the water workers' union. But then the party would be going against its own commitments.
Arena could gain voter confidence by cancelling its mining contracts with Pacific Rim Corporation and the scores of other exploitative projects it has promoted in northern El Salvador.
But for Arena, predatory foreign investment and diminished public ownership are signs of "efficiency" and "progress".
Arena has shown contempt for voters, while putting its friendly foreign investors on notice of what looks to them as an impending disaster: A functioning democracy.
Arena party leaders, who have been selling El Salvador piecemeal to multinational corporations for years, are now working quickly to secure corporate-driven development contracts before Saca's term expires in June.
An FMLN victory would immediately open up the government's accounting books, exposing Arena's systematic siphoning of national and foreign aid budgets.
In addition, the FMLN has repeatedly denounced the fact that 85% of El Salvador's land and commercial sectors are owned by a five-family oligarchy.
Arena is not going down without a fight — even if it means acting illegally. The mainstream media are helping Arena, and seeking to vilify the FMLN.
If the FMLN has its way, El Salvador will join the growing movement for participatory democracy across Latin America in its own unique way, as prescribed by the people who voted it into power.
Funes has promised a transparent budget prioritisation process and a functional attorney general's office. He has also committed himself to strengthening citizen's rights to basic necessities such as food, education, housing, health care and civil liberties.
The FMLN's ability to make these goals a reality begins and ends with its base of support and the poor majority.
"The people's resistance in El Salvador walks on two feet; one foot is the social movement and the other is the FMLN", union organiser Estela Ramirez argued.
[Abridged from http://www.cispes.org. Erica Thompson is a media correspondent for the Committee in Solidarity of the People of El Salvador (CISPES).]