Tensions rise in El Salvador after tight presidential runoff race

The FMLN won its first election in 2009 when former CNN journalist Mauricio Funes captured the presidency. The victory signaled a dramatic shift toward the left for El Salvador, which had been governed by a string of ultra-conservative governments since before the end of the civil war.

The FMLN was a guerrilla movement that waged a hard-fought battle in the 1980s against the military, political and business elite that had traditionally held on to power in El Salvador. The guerrillas were welcomed to the political process following the signing of the 1992 peace accords but lost all the presidential races to Arena until 2009.

With Funes in office, the FMLN has focused its efforts on improving social and living standards for all Salvadorans. One of Funes’ major drives has been to distribute school uniforms and supplies to encourage poor families to push their children to stay in education.

Of El Salvador’s 6.2 million residents, 34.5 percent live below the poverty line and, according to the United Nations, 60 percent of homes in the country have no running water or electricity. While the FMLN government has banked on the social policies to win support among the poor, El Salvador suffers from stagnated growth. In 2013, the country’s economy grew 1.7 percent – the third lowest in Latin America last year.

Arena had presented itself during elections as the best option to stimulate the economy but at the same time been pointed in promising to embark on new social policies. The country’s conservative leaders have slowly realized that they needed to reinvent themselves politically – albeit under the same neoliberal and ultra-religious ideology that has historically define them – or become fossils of the past.

Nevertheless, two decades after the Salvadoran Civil War, the country remains a society polarized not only between right and left but also between two groups: the FMLN with it leftist roots completely institutionalized, and the Arena, internally divided between those who remain in the past and other members closer to the center-right who believe in dialogue rather than confrontation.

During the campaign, the ultra-conservatives warned about the possibility of Chavism spreading to El Salvador while Quijano accused the FMLN candidate of trying to introduce a Bolivarian Revolution in the country. “The election on March 9 is a battle between freedom and dictatorship,” he said a few weeks ago.

Even the nation's conservative press has linked the FMLN with the Venezuelan government of President Nicolás Maduro. Diario de Hoy, one of the most widely read newspapers in El Salvador, published an editorial under the headline: "Don't put your privilege of living in freedom at risk."

“The freedom that God gives men as a natural right is in grave danger of being lost in the same way the Venezuelans have lost it and the hundreds of millions of tragic people who suffer under dictatorships,” the editorial said.

In an interview with EL PAÍS in January, President Funes stressed the differences between the leftist movement in Venezuela and his party. “The FMLN is a pragmatic team that has adapted to new realities. Sánchez Cerén is a historic commander of the FMLN and has Marxist training, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t learned how to govern.

“He has come to realize what should be done and what cannot be done. We cannot install a regime like the one in Cuba or Venezuela, or cannot live in perpetual confrontation with the United States when one-third of our countrymen live there.”