Junio 20, 2007
Proceso 1246

Globalization and the easy-success culture

The cultural dimension of globalization generates values, beliefs, behavior trends, and different symbols of different dimensions. Globalization also has to do with information, the free circulation of ideas, tolerance, the connection with certain values that were taboos at some point in history, the defense of democracy, and the rejection to situations of inequality and oppression. The values of the occidental world are part of the globalization culture, and not to acknowledge this would be like closing our eyes to the influence of those values, or to the transformations that took place in Eastern Europe in the context of the Perestroika –or in the freedom desires of the Chinese youth massacred in the Tiananmen Plaza back in 1989. To reject these visions would be like thinking about the culture of globalization in the most aberrant terms. However, it is necessary to see that there are also negative aspects involved in this process: the most respectable features of globalization have grown weaker, and very few people are able to take advantage of globalization.
            One of the most characteristic features of the cultural globalization is the promotion of an easy-success lifestyle. The easy-success lifestyle is measured in terms of the amount of goods that a person is able to posses, and in terms of how much a person can enjoy these goods symbolically speaking. This is what Jimmy Rafkin refers to as “the access era”, where “concepts, ideas, images –and not things- are the items with actual value in the new economy.  Wealth does not belong anymore to a material sphere, but to the human imagination and creativity”. In this access-era, brands become a cultural element of first importance. “With the mania of brands –says Naomi Klein- now there is a new kind of businessman, who informs us with pride that the X brand is not a product, but a lifestyle, an attitude, a group of values, a personal appearance matter, and an idea”.
            In addition to these views, it is important to consider that brands expand themselves and occupy different public and private spaces, and that is why brands become an important part of the every-day life of many people. “The present state of the cultural expansion of brands goes beyond the traditional sponsoring tasks that companies used to deal with in the past: the classic agreement through which a company donates money for a cause in order that its logo appears in a show or in a flag. This is very much like the approach that Tommy Hilfiger uses when he raves about a brand that appears in the front side of an urban landscape, in music, in art, in films, in celebration scenes, in magazines, in sports events, and in schools. This ambitious project turns a logo in the center of everything it touches: this is not only an addition to a happy association of ideas, but the main attraction”.
            Brands also symbolize many things, but most of all they are about success, and not just any type of success, but an easily-attainable kind of success, the one you can achieve through the shortest pathway.
            This easy-success culture has been both created and recreated mainly by the American business groups, and from that nation –thanks to the global communication nets- the idea has been spread around the world. This is one of the worst cultural legacies that the United States has ever given to humankind. As George Soros indicates, “when a society admires success independently from the way it is achieved, the protection against cheating and lying and other similar practices becomes less effective. People start getting more and more disappointed and stop expecting a high integrity level from their leaders. Being fooled is not a surprise anymore. The search for an unlimited amount of success creates an unstable foundation of values for the society. Stability requires a group of intrinsic values that can be noticed independently from the consequences”.
            A society that values success at any cost, in addition to being unstable, is ethically poor at both a civil and a political level; it is a society without a solid moral background –it knows no justice, it does not respect the dignity of others, it does not reject oppression- which is essential to keep the social bonds connected. When these values become weaker, a society behaves through a dysfunctional pattern, that is, a “run for your own life” kind of attitude, and in this context those who are more affected by this are the most vulnerable members of society.
            The easy-success culture already has roots in El Salvador. Right now we are witnessing -with the ANDA case-, for instance, the fraud committed by Carlos Perla, Mario Orellana and their accomplices, a fraud that involves millions of dollars, the portrayal of a scene staged in the media of what this easy-success culture is all about in one of its worst outbursts. They became illegally wealthy in a very short period of time and they enjoyed this lifestyle spending the money on wines, food, cars, and fun. They say that they were not ashamed by this. They have not even talked about returning what they stole, and the authorities have been inefficient when it comes to discuss the strategies to recuperate the money. In the meantime, those implicated in the case keep having a blast.
            The Salvadoran society is just watching this scene. People are observing how easy it was for Perla, for Orellana and the rest of their accomplices to make a fortune, how good it has been for them in terms of enjoying what they got with their gimmicks, and how now they are basically planning how to easily get out of the situation, after they were used as scapegoats in other similar corruption cases that are corroding the Salvadoran State’s apparatus. Practically none of those implicated in this case has pleaded innocence on having committed any kind of offense against the public patrimony. However, they want to find an easy way out and not to face the punishment they deserve, and this means to return to the State every cent they illegally took.
            If they manage to get away with this, this will be one more successful test for them. It will also be a sign for society to see that in El Salvador the easy-success culture and impunity walk hand in hand.

A separate elections process and the residential vote

A couple of articles about the up-coming elections of 2009 have been recently published by the press. On the one hand, the political parties represented in the Supreme Electoral Court (TSE, in Spanish), reached an agreement to establish a separate elections process: the municipal and the legislative elections will have their own period, and so will the presidential elections. On the other hand, the TSE declared that the residential vote will not become part of the electoral mechanisms. The TSE did not explain why they decided this. Both decisions, however, will have certain implications on the future elections, and therefore deserve to be analyzed, especially in terms of profits for the people involved in this process.
            Decisions such as these ones have always been connected with political conjunctions and to the particular interests of the parties, and not with reliable technical guidelines or to the viability of its implementation possibilities. Therefore, each political party has been willing to promote only the most convenient measures that can be easily adjusted to their own goals, without considering what is best for the country or what is best to improve the electoral process.
            The resolutions of the TSE once again indicate are the advantages of the participation of the parties inside the organizations in charge of the elections, due to its institutional design. In this context, the rhythm of the transformation process in the present electoral system depends on the negotiations between the political institutions, and have practically nothing much to do with the welfare of the Salvadorans.
            This tendency will not improve the efficiency of the incipient bureaucratic democracy in the country. That is why it is necessary that the political parties stay out of this decision-making process as a security measure to avoid the manipulation of this process. A reform of this kind, however, is far from being possible, because the parties have blindly trusted in the configuration of the TSE as an example of political representation, pluralism, and, above all, as a guarantee to avoid an electoral fraud. Nevertheless, reality has shown us the opposite: the present performance of the TSE responds to a logic of power-distribution, to a negotiation of interests, rather than to a transparent electoral administration.

Separate elections
Since mid 2006, the political parties began to react upon the 2009 elections, a process that will define the public positions through a popular election system. In that sense, the most important political parties, ARENA and the FMLN, have always seemed to agree with the separation of the election processes. However, both political institutions only considered this as a possible option among the alternatives that were suggested by other organizations.
            The PCN did seem interested from the very start in separating the aforementioned electoral processes. They indicated that the most important parties would get more votes if both elections were held in the same period, and that in this context the small parties would be in a disadvantageous situation and would even run the risk of disappearing. However, this opinion showed its weak side, because in the 2004 elections neither the PCN nor the PDC reached the minimum amount of votes to remain alive, and their existence was at risk. Nevertheless, both parties were “resuscitated” after a questionable resolution made by the Supreme Court of Justice.
            In that sense, the PCN has a very particular interest at stake. By being the main promoter of the separation of the electoral processes, what it intends to do is to make sure that it will have a share of legislative representation similar to the one it has always had in the past. This mechanism would also make this party able to keep its alliance with ARENA. The Secretary General of the PCN, Ciro Cruz Zepeda proposed to revive the national circumscription mechanism, which enables them to have a national representation as political parties.
            The PCN evidently wants to keep its position of power and influence the national politics, that is why it should not seem odd if its most important leader is trying to hold on to a stable position in his party inside the governmental structures at any cost. With the calculations of the parties aside, the new disposition not only increases the cost of the elections, but it also increases the amount of time in which the electoral campaigns take place. This could also have a negative effect on the participation of the voters, because two electoral events in the same year could discourage the citizens will to go and vote.

The residential vote
Along with the announcement of the separate elections, the TSE also revealed that the residential vote was not to be adopted in the country. However, the reasons they considered to make this decision are quite questionable. If the decision of the TSE were to be examined, some would find that they have guided their conclusion based on the less specific facts.
            In the beginning, the TSE sustained that El Salvador lacks an accurate cartographic system, but this is not true according to certain sources that belong to this institution, because they believe that they do count with the necessary resources and with enough time to implement the logistical and the organizational transformations that are required. On the other hand, when the residential vote operation was tested in 2006, the organization did gain some experience to understand and validate this procedure. Therefore, the TSE would be expected at this point to make a statement about the residential vote based on that experience in order to exactly determine its degree of viability. In spite of this situation, it has not presented any studies that might reveal the results obtained in that field, and this could lead people to believe that the decision of not implementing the residential vote has been made without considering the technical criteria.
            Among other arguments against this, in recent days, a team of specialists in the electoral process who came from Panama revealed to the press that El Salvador lacks the necessary conditions to adopt this voting mechanism. In order to sustain such statement, the experts presented a brief document that, according to them, contains a group of technical reasons. It is a shameful situation to see that the governmental authorities basically make statements without any consistent justifications at all, and use them as pretexts to reveal their decisions. A study of just a few pages cannot be considered as a definite criterion to approve or disapprove of a political measure of such importance.
            The most important reason why the right wing parties have refused to accept the residential vote is that the prevailing system allows them to mobilize voters in the national territory. If the residential vote were approved, this kind of actions would not make sense anymore. Contrary to these decisions, the residential vote brings certain advantages that are ignored by the TSE. On the one hand, to bring the ballot boxes closer to the electorate would help to reduce the amount of abstention. On the other hand, this practice would help reduce the intensity of the abuse committed by some of the political institutions, something that would reduce the possibility of frauds and would give more transparency to the process.

The pending electoral reforms
To reject the possibility of a residential vote is not a positive decision. The political institutes do not seem to be clearly willing to examine the present electoral system, which is in a great need of reforms if the intention is to improve it. The silence of the right wing parties in reference to those other reforms is an unmistakable sign of their fallacious commitment to improve the democratic process that the country is following.
            In that sense, in conjunctions such as these ones, the civil society has to place in the public opinion those delicate issues that have not been discussed yet: the financing of the political institutions, the examination and the regulation of the electoral campaigns, and, most of all, the disconnection between the interests of the parties and the leading organizations involved in the electoral process (the TSE and the RNPN).
            On the other hand, the need to improve the organization of the electoral events and the guarantee to handle the results in a transparent manner should also be counted among the essential demands. These and other important reforms should be seen, discussed and accepted by the political parties not as a senseless ideological confrontation, or as an unfunded criticism, but as a commitment that they have to the society. In this context, we should expect that while 2009 arrives, the political parties will keep working under the electoral logic. That is why it should not seem odd if the decisions of these institutions that are conceived out of the political axis have to do mostly with the political parties.

Other articles featured in this issue of Proceso:

• The completion of the Development Objectives of the Millennium in El Salvador (II)
• A disapproval everyone disagrees with: About RCTV (Radio Caracas Television, in Venezuela)
• The closing of RCTV in Venezuela
• The IDHUCA Report: Electoral calculations
• The Presidential discourse of Saca for the third year of his administration (III)