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Proceso 1126
December 15, 2004
ISSN 0259-9864
Editorial: A bad year for the life of the population
Politics: Institutional lawsuits
Regional: Questionable politics
A bad year for the life of the population
The divorce between the economic, the social, and the
political situation of the Salvadoran population has remained inalterable,
according to the survey of the Institute of Public Opinion of the UCA (IUDOP, in
Spanish), aimed to evaluate year 2004. The political opposition, particularly
the FMLN, seems incapable to take advantage of that breach to also gain
popularity -and the elections-. At the moment, therefore, this divorce is
advantageous for ARENA.
In fact, the main problem for a considerable portion of the public opinion is
the economy, whereas security now occupies a very distant second place. Almost
half of those interviewed indicated that now they are poorer than they were
before, and four out of every ten people feel that their economic situation has
not improved in this year. Most people believe that their situation is the same
or worse now than it was a year ago, and only 10% think that their economic
situation has improved. The family situation would not have improved either for
a little more than half of the population, and for one third, their situation
would have gotten worse. The two reasons that most people mentioned to describe
their poverty level are the high cost of living and dollarization, nowadays
people tend to reject dollarization more than they did when it was imposed. Yet,
these evaluations are similar to those of last year. Therefore, in 2004, the
perception of the population on its economic state has not varied, and the
government would not have done anything significant either to modifying it. The
perspectives for the next year are not flattering. Almost four out of every ten
people think that the situation will get worse, one third says that it will
remain the same, and only one third believes that it will improve.
It should not seem strange then, that four out of every ten people want to leave
the country and go live abroad -half of those interviewed indicated that they
have close relatives living abroad- and that only a little less than one third
thinks that the country goes well, whereas almost seven out of every ten people
continue insisting on the idea that we need a change. However, they do not seem
to think that this change will come with the Free Trade Agreement, the last
proposal of the ARENA administration to promote the economic growth and
development.
A little more than one third thinks that the Free Trade Agreement will bring
more poverty, whereas a similar proportion thinks that it will help. What people
do not have any doubts about is that both the business elite and the wealthy
individuals will be the ones that will get more benefits out of the Agreement.
Only a very small sector of the population thinks that the benefits of the
Agreement will be for all. These opinions about the treaty have been more
critical now than they were a year ago. The specific importance of the
emigration issue contributes to the fact that in the Salvadoran society the
public opinion is decidedly Republican; most people believe that the victory of
this party in the United States, is a positive event for the national interests
as well as for the Salvadoran residents in that country. This is one more
evidence that the Salvadoran public opinion tends to go towards the position of
the right wing than towards those stances that promote changes -although, in
fact, the difference between both American parties only has to do with a matter
of emphasis-.
Contrary to other previous evaluations on the governmental publicity about the
"iron fist" plan, the security issue has lost the level of importance that it
had before. A little more than half of those interviewed thinks that, by the end
of 2004, there will be a lower level of delinquency -except for the homicide
cases- than there was before. On the other hand, a little more than one fifth
thinks the opposite. This it is the lowest percentage revealed by an annual
survey in the last five years. This perception is corroborated by another piece
of information of the survey. Most of those interviewed claim not to have been a
victim of delinquency in this year, and see that the police is more efficient in
its fight against delinquency, and, in addition, they trust in the police
–although they do not have much trust in the Attorney General’s Office or in the
Supreme Court of Justice, none of them counts with the people’s appreciation-.
However, those who have been the victims of a criminal event, generally do not
report it to the authorities.
The majority agrees with "the super iron fist" plan as well as with its
counterpart, "the friendly hand" plan, although they have certain reservations
in this issue. The former has more acceptance than the latter, which means that
the population prefers the use of force than the implementation of a social
policy. Nevertheless, the public opinion does not know how to explain why in
2004, there were more homicides than in 2003. In fact, it seems as if those
interviewed believe in the version of the Saca administration, which explains
that the number of homicides has increased because the gang members kill other
gang members, they kill other individuals, the individuals kill gang members,
and the individuals die as a result of the fights between the gang members. In
other words, the explanation can always be found in the gangs. The government
defends that the suitable answer is the use of force, without realizing that, at
the same time, it is promoting a contradictory idea. This version about the
national violence does not have an empirical foundation, since no authority is
investigating these homicides. Most of the times, the circumstances and the
reasons for a homicide are unknown. This position can only be described as a
lack of efficiency of the Saca administration to explain the inexplicable. The
statistics reveal that the security plans are not getting the expected results,
even if the number of arrested gang members has increased, and even if hundreds
of them remain behind bars. The best example of this failure is the case of the
department of Sonsonate.
Nevertheless, the majority accepts the Saca administration. The points granted
by the public opinion are superior to the ones obtained by former president
Flores, at the end of 2003; however, this amount is inferior than the one
obtained by Saca himself after the first one hundred days in the government.
Thus, a little more than half of the population thinks that Saca is leading a
good administration, one third of those interviewed do not seem to care for his
performance, and only a minority thinks that his performance is bad. Almost half
those interviewed thinks that he is fulfilling his electoral promises, and
almost one third thinks that he is only partially fulfilling them. For almost
half of the population, ARENA means social and economic stability. However, the
opinions are more divided when it comes to trusting the central government, the
combat against corruption, particularly, the concealment of the fraud in ANDA,
and the application of justice –undoubtedly, there should not be any privileges
for those involved in these cases-. The same can be said about how effective the
discussion groups really are, and if the governance discussion group is able to
impose its decisions or not. Nevertheless six out every ten people think that
the FMLN was wrong when it decided to walk away from the governance discussion
group, whereas a little more than three out of ten think that it was a good
decision. Also, the opinions are very much divided when it comes to say if the
tributary reform generates a higher level of revenue for the State’s treasury.
What people are sure about is that those that have more money should pay more
taxes. For a little more than half of those interviewed, the political situation
remains exactly the same; the rest of opinions on this subject are divided
between those who say that it has improved and those who think that it has taken
a turn for the worse.
The divorce between the economic aspects and the true state of the citizen’s
security and politics makes ARENA’s public image look more positive that the one
of the FMLN. However, on the other hand, it also shows the weakness of the
latter, in a context that had to favor it, due to the deterioration of the
population’s life standards and the desire for a social transformation. One
third assures that the image of ARENA has improved, against 8% who assure that
FMLN has somehow improved its image. While 17 affirm that the image of ARENA has
gotten worse, and 41 say the same about the image of the FMLN. For the rest,
more than half of those interviewed, the image of both parties has not changed.
When exploring these appreciations, there is an FMLN weakened before most of the
public opinion, the one that must give this party the necessary votes to get to
the Executive power.
The majority thinks that the recent internal elections have not strengthened the
FMLN, while a little more than one third thinks the opposite. In any case, the
majority perceives that these elections have not improved the union of the
members inside the FMLN. Those interviewed do not think that their internal
electoral mechanisms are more democratic than those of ARENA. The internal
elections of the latter are perceived as more democratic than those of the FMLN,
by a considerable difference. If the FMLN wishes to win the elections, most of
the opinions indicate that the FMLN has to change its candidate, that is, Handal,
and favor the union of the party’s members. If the public opinion were to
participate in the party’s election process, the people would not have voted for
him and his team to guide the party. In other words, it is clear that the people
prefers ARENA, even though the voters perceives that it is a party guided in a
descendent order of powers: the business elite, President Saca, the National
Executive Council, and the representatives of the party’s bases.
This preference is reflected in the intention of the votes. If there were
elections now, ARENA would win them over the FMLN by more than two to one, 40%
against 18%. More than one third assures that they would not vote neither for
ARENA nor for the FMLN, and the rest did not respond. The PCN would obtain 4.8 %
of the votes, and the PDC 3 %. Consequently, more than half of those interviewed
believe that ARENA will win the next elections, a little more than one third
does not know what will happen, and only 13% thinks that the FMLN will win.
Although most of those interviewed have just a little or no confidence at all in
the political parties, the opinions are divided in two similar blocks when it
comes to wonder about the convenience of creating new parties of either the left
wing or the right wing. A similar division can be found between those who are in
favor and those who are against the political presence of the PCN and the PDC.
In synthesis, the year 2004 has been a negative year for most of the Salvadoran
population. They have not been able to connect poverty and social violence with
the ARENA administrations. Partly, this is due to the intense advertising
campaign of the government of Saca, and by his experience as a mass
communicator; and partly to the connivance of the most important mass media
enterprises, which have not contributed to connect those realities, for obvious
reasons; and because the FMLN has not been able to do it either.
Institutional lawsuits
The objective of this article is to basically approach a
subject that has been discussed throughout the last days: the attitude of the
FMLN. Some consider that this attitude is a serious obstacle against the rising
Salvadoran democracy. The need to approve the general budget of the nation has
been used as a reason to revive this discussion. To tell the truth, it is not
the first time that this subject about the behavior of the political actors is
approached, particularly the behavior of the FMLN in reference to the operation
of the country’s institutional democracy. On this matter, even those analysts
with an unquestionable integrity, have a negative opinion about the
intransigency of the left wing party.
In the present discussion on the budget, one of these analysts somehow sustained
that the FMLN would have to consider that Elías Antonio Saca was the winner of
the last elections. Before such evidence, some believe that the left wing party
has to make things easier to the new president. In other words, the alleged
constitutional right of having a larger margin of power in the final
configuration of the State’s budget is acknowledged in the case of the
President. In this atmosphere, one of the ministers of the government described
the attitude of the FMLN as a gangster-like political attitude. The demands of
the left wing party are interpreted as a will to keep putting obstacles to the
development of the events, hardly connected with a democratic governance. In
order to sustain his affirmation, this member of the government declared that,
besides looking for a privileged treatment, the members of the FMLN propose
"reforms" aimed to confiscate of the assets of the national businessmen.
These declarations are usually not widely discussed. It is assumed that they
come from the authorized voices of the society, whose honesty and critical
attitude before ARENA is legitimate. Therefore, according to this perspective,
there are enough reasons for this affirmation to prevail, and it seems to
indicate that the left wing party is the main obstacle for the good performance
of the political institutions.
Nevertheless, the first thing that has to be said about the declarations of
those who consider that the demands of the FMLN are illegitimate requests
against the official party, is that these demands do not threaten the
institutional instability as some would like the people to believe. In spite of
the declarations -and, without the intention to justify the actions of the left
wing party, it is necessary to say that any political party has the right to
demand what it believes to be advisable according to the electoral force that it
holds at a specific moment. In this sense, those who discredit the positions of
the FMLN, because they consider them as illegitimate opinions, end up reflecting
their ignorance about politics and its mechanisms. All the political
negotiations are made based on the “negotiations” of the different forces
according to their legislative importance.
In this case, the FMLN has an important presence in the Legislative Assembly,
because the electorate decided that the party should. The left wing party
obtained 33.9% of the votes and 36.9% of the legislative seats, while ARENA got
31.9% of the votes, and 32.1% of the seats in the Congress. Thanks to these
results, the FMLN has been the party that has received more votes, and ,
therefore, it is a majority in the congress. Consequently, if it is considered
that the parties are always measured based on their force, it is easier to
understand the reality that this commentary is trying to describe.
In reference to this subject, Sartori sustains that "the force of a party is, in
the first place, its electoral force [... ] Nevertheless, the votes are
translated into seats, and this takes us to the force of the parliamentary
party. In order to avoid unnecessary complications, we can, therefore be content
with the `strength in steps’, which after all is what matters when the elections
are over (...) Then, it is permissible to begin with this measure: the strength
of the parliamentary party is indicated by its percentage of seats in the
Chamber". On the other hand, the strength of a party is determined when it is
seen as an instrument of the government. However, the more parties there are,
the more we must wonder about the governance potential, or the possibilities
that each party has of becoming part of a coalition. What truly weights in the
balance of the different parties is the extent in which a party can be needed by
one or more of the possible governmental majorities.
A problem of institutional design
Those who speak about how Saca has reached a higher level of legitimacy and
defend his alleged right to participate in the decisions concerning the budget,
have not understood yet the design of the established institutional game in the
Constitution of 1983. This version of the Constitution stipulates the total
sovereignty of the congressmen and that they represent the population in the
same level that the President does. In this sense, the constitution designed a
political body of two branches which holds the representation of the independent
people. The president as well as the congressmen are directly chosen by the
voters.
That first explanation is worth for those who grant a larger degree of
legitimacy to the president and less to the congressmen in matters connected
with the budget. It is not necessary to forget that the Constitution gives
complete power to the body of congressmen to modify the budget of the State as
they please. The congressmen directly report their performance to the
population, and they are elected through votes, that is why no one should be
surprised if a certain political party decides to block the program of
governmental expenses for the sake of getting resources to satisfy the demands
of their own voters.
This is something that has a direct relation with our institutional design,
which consecrates the total independence of both branches. This same
organizational operation design gave less importance to the possible
institutional isolation in case that each one of the organs were controlled by
different political organisms, as it happens in the present. This is known as
the traps of the presidential systems with double legitimacy in the parliament
and in the Executive power. In other words, more than blaming the FMLN for
allegedly blocking the approval of the budget, it is necessary to pay attention
to the institutional political design that allows and encourages such blockage.
In this context, there are several possible stances. In the first place, a way
of mutual discredit can be chosen, or simply to criticize one of the actors,
according to the interests of the critic. Nevertheless, this critique does not
have much of a foundation. It ignores fundamental matters such as the game of
forces between the political actors, the foundation of any political system.
This position, runs the risk of being ineffective because it does not contribute
to resolve the problem.
Questionable politics
First there was the murder of the journalist Maria Jose
Bravo, committed by a member of the Partido Liberal Constitucionalista (the
Constitutionalist Liberal Party; PLC, in Spanish); then, Arnoldo Aleman, the
former Nicaraguan president, was released from prison, he was in jail due to his
acts of corruption. Now, what is taking place in Nicaragua is an alliance
between the faction of the PLC, which sympathizes with Aleman, and the Frente
Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (the Sandinista Front of National Liberation;
FSLN, in Spanish), to dismiss President Enrique Bolaños, who, by the way, also
belongs to the PLC.
The murder of the journalist was committed on November 9th, while she covered
the municipal elections in the city of Juigalpa, 85 miles to the south of
Managua. Bravo, who was 26 years old and a correspondent for Hoy and La Prensa
(a couple of newspapers), was wounded during a fight between members of the PLC
and the derechista Alianza para la Republica; (the rightist Alliance for the
Republic, APRE, in Spanish).
Bravo was shot and killed by the former mayor of the PLC, Eugenio Hernandez
Gonzalez. The official version of the police indicates that it was an accident,
although a forensic report mentioned by the organization called Reporters
Without Borders assures that the firing was intentional. The first hearing of
the case against Hernandez was verified on November 24th, although the crime
remains unpunished.
The crime took place within the context of the Nicaraguan municipal elections, a
plague of policies without any true proposals aimed to resolve the problems of
this Central American country.
The death of Maria Jose Bravo reminds us of the murder of another Nicaraguan
journalist, in 1978: Pedro Joaquin Chamorro, who was killed by the Somocista
regime, because he denounced in the newspapers the crimes committed by this
regime. What happened to both Bravo and Chamorro is, in fact, a sample of the
danger in which the press has been for telling the truth. These journalists did
not do anything to provoke the political adversaries of the news media they
worked for. Chamorro and Bravo were killed while fulfilling their task:
informing the public about the reality of the country.
Chamorro died in the context of a dictatorship. The life of Bravo was sacrificed
in a time when Nicaragua is allegedly democratic. Nevertheless, this crime is a
sample that democracy -understood as a way of life and not only as an electoral
procedure- is under a constant threat. In a democratic regime, the existence of
an independent form of journalism, that can fulfill the task of analyzing
reality and support the interests of the citizens, is an unavoidable
requirement. But when the exercise of the critic is punished with death, it
becomes a step backwards to the authoritarian structures of power.
The victory of corruption
Last year, the edition of this weekly publication closed the issue speaking
about the judicial decision that put the former Nicaraguan president, Arnoldo
Aleman, behind bars. At the time, these pages indicated that such action was a
precedent for other legal systems, since, thanks to the active participation of
the citizenry and the support of the Bolaños administration, the impossible was
achieved: to put a former president accused of corruption behind bars.
The events that took place in El Salvador throughout the present year are the
reason for those words of praise. In the country it is impossible to bring
public officials before justice and, instead, the usual is to give them certain
benefits such as the "criterion of opportunity" applied in a biased fashion. In
short, the arrest of Aleman constituted a landmark in the fight against
corruption in Central America. This was also a warning sign for the politicians,
who seem to be more interested in getting their individual privileges that in
looking for the common welfare. The jail time that Aleman did was sort of a
warning: corrupted politics do not pay.
On last December 3rd, Arnoldo Aleman, left his prison cell to return to his
private hacienda. A few hours before that, the Court of Appeals annulled the
sentence which condemned him to prison because of a fraud that involved millions
connected with a television channel. This is how they threw away the effort of
the honest judicial authorities, and the denunciation work of the civilian
organizations.
There are some who think that the liberation of Aleman was due to a pact between
the PLC and the FSLN. Although this information has not been verified, it is
possible to remember that both parties had already made pacts in the past. To
negotiate is somehow a regular procedure in the life of the political parties.
Nevertheless, both of these political organizations, back when Aleman was
president, (the FSLN, the opposition that had sworn years before to "rule the
country from the bases",) celebrated the "pact of stability": the FSLN would not
lead the masses to the streets, in exchange for dropping the accusations against
their leader, Daniel Ortega. From that moment on, "pact" became a cursed word in
the Nicaraguan political vocabulary.
What is certain is that the PLC and the FSLN are indeed working very close
during these last days. Their congressmen try to introduce constitutional
reforms to reduce the amount of power that President Bolaños has, among them, to
reduce his capacity of veto -the Assembly could neutralize the presidential
veto-. In addition, they would take away from the Executive the faculty to
designate the General Superintendent of the Banking System. The defenders of
these reforms argue that the intention is to balance the powers. For a
congressman of the PLC, Wilfredo Navarro, "in Nicaragua we are used to an
absolute, an authoritarian, and an arrogant Executive authority; independently
from any ideological vision, it always tries to prevail, therefore, it is about
balancing the situation, and prevent that one power can prevail over the other
".
Probably this argument could seem right, but it is important to see that it
occurs within the framework of a struggle between Bolaños and the faction of the
PLC that is against him, next to the FSLN. To intend that the Executive does not
exert an absolute power, protected in its right of veto, is a positive goal.
Remember, for instance, how the former Salvadoran president Flores used his veto
to restrain any initiative of the opposition. However, in the case of Nicaragua,
this action seems to be part of that confrontation between the coalition FSLN-PLC
and Bolaños.
A transformation in the institutional regulations is not something positive in
itself. For years, the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly was leaded by a
congressman of the fraction that had gathered more votes. Nevertheless, the
fractions of ARENA and the FMLN changed this when the FMLN obtained the
legislative majority. They changed it, adducing that a country was more
democratic when all of the parties are able to alternate their presence in the
parliamentary presidency. And surely they will change that disposition when it
seems convenient for them. That is the same behavior of the reforms proposed by
the Liberals and Sandinistas.
Politics in Nicaragua have fallen into the hands of an indecent representation,
to a point that degrades the legitimate resources, such as proposing
institutional reforms. A questionable form of politics is winning the game.
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