Salvador Presents Washington Conservatives With Hard Choice

When assassins shot Salvadoran archbishop Óscar Romero through the heart as he raised the Eucharist to worshipers at Mass on this day in 1980, they bet that their brazen sacrilege would cow a population increasingly restive at conservative rule. For a quarter century El Salvador's hard right maintained a lock on the country's government--only to be ousted in a free election last week for the first time in the country's history. And the howls from their conservative protectors in Washington cast real doubt on the genuineness of the American political consensus in support of democracy.

Seemingly in denial of their own loss of power in Barack Obama's Washington, several of the Capitol's most conservative congressmen shrilly warned Salvadorans that they would pay dearly if they dared to elect Mauricio Funes, the presidential candidate of the leftist coalition. Indiana's Dan Burton, third ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, declared on the floor of Congress that Salvadoran immigrants' remittances home "will be cut, and I hope the people of El Salvador are aware of that because it will have a tremendous impact on individuals and their economy."

Another Republican on the committee, California's Dana Rohrabacher, threatened Salvadorans with "immigration restrictions" as well as a block on wage-earners' money to their families back home. Those remittances are El Salvador's largest source of income from abroad.

Washington conservatives have played this card before. On the eve of the Salvadoran election in 2004, Bush administration officials warned Salvadorans about the impact on Washington's "economic and migration-related relations" with El Salvador in the event of the right's defeat. And El Salvador's conservatives ran television ads dovetailing with the messages from their Washington allies, claiming Salavadoran emigrants would be deported from the United States and the remittances severed.

Such overt interference almost certainly did not tip the balance in 2004. The left-wing candidate, Schafik Handal, had been a leader of El Salvador's tiny communist party before becoming a guerrilla leader in the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) during the civil war--a political résumé of very limited appeal; he lost in a landslide.

But the conservatives went into this year's campaign in deep trouble. The free-market nostrums and Central America free trade agreement they had touted in 2004 seemed a bit threadbare as the U.S. economy tanked, sinking many tiny Salvadoran lifeboats with it. The ARENA party--founded by the mastermind of Archbishop Romero's murder, Roberto d'Aubuisson--nominated the national police chief for president, which suggested a bit too obviously what its priorities might be. And the left shook off the FMLN infatuation with running war-time guerrilla leaders and nominated a popular television talk-show host whose leftist leanings are decidedly moderate.

This time around the conservatives needed their lifeline in Washington to keep control. And true to form, U.S. conservatives--who bristled last year at any reminder of the rest of the world's enthusiasm for Obama--were ready to spring into action, despite their obvious impotence in American policymaking today. (The Obama administration repudiated their interference and declared the United States was strictly netural.)

The congressmen's heavy-handed threats, though spurned by a majority of El Salvador's voters last week, underscore a compulsive disposition to dictate other peoples' election decisions. When Ronald Reagan embraced a national endowment for democracy, he did not add the qualifier, "so long as you elect the presidents I pick for you." But his political heirs seem incapable of controlling their urge to impose leaders to their liking on other countries, and to disregard election results that empower political leaders they detest.

In the Americas, their litmus test is devotion to North American-style unregulated capitalism. On that score, the AntiChrist is of course Castro's Cuba, and if an elected leader in Latin America even hints at a rapprochement with the aging dictatorship in Havana, Washington's conservatives are primed to respond rabidly. During George Bush's first term--even as Iraq became the emblem of aggressive promotion of democracy--they conspired to oust Haiti's president Jean-Bertrand Aristide and facilitated the failed coup against Venezuela's Hugo Chávez that only succeeded in radicalizing him.

In the Middle East, America's conservatives respected election results only so long as they produced leaders that Washington wanted to work with. The Bush administration shunned Palestinian president Yasir Arafat and when Hamas candidates won control of the Palestinian assembly, they worked feverishly to sabotage the elected government and even to block emergence of a coalition "unity government." They quietly dropped their crusade to democratize the Arab world when a growing share of Egyptians expressed their yearning for change by voting for Islamist candidates.

American conservatives need to wake up. A commitment to democracy means respecting people's decisions about their own futures, even to the point of making economically risky choices. (The American people make economically risky choices in 2000 and 2004, and have to live with the consequences.)

Ironically, when Pope Paul VI appointed Monsignor Romero as archbishop of San Salvador in 1977, he was seen as a quite conservative choice. It was only seeing his priests gunned down for speaking up for the rights of the poor that transformed a traditionalist cleric into an ever more outspoken advocate for change. Perhaps our own home-grown conservatives can develop a bit more humility in respecting others' democratic rights as well. It will be a big help in restoring America's international credibility--the change we need.

Comments

[Morgan]

There is a tendency to build upon a left wing image for Haiti's Aristide. He was as bad as any other dictator with a staggering human rights record that saw him - among other things - murder two opposing presidential candidates in 1991. He had the opportunity to be the greatest president in Haitian history. Unfortunately, the people fell in love with the words - which did not reflect the true man. He went on to murder many, ignore the plight of the poor, steal hundreds of millions in foreign aid and amass a fortune from the cocaine trade, which he cultivated, controlled and expanded. Conservative estimates place his fortune somewhere over $1.5 billion. He could use this to help his people. However, during his period in Washingron exile, and his time in South Africa...Aristide has not sent so much as a single bag of rice to his people. While in Washington he did buy five expensive Georgetown condominiums and a fleet of Lexus cars for his camp-followers. He also handed out bags of cash to key decision-makers, ensuring the fact that no one will indict him for the cocaine he sent to destroy America's society.

[Jeffrey Laurenti]

Aristide's messianic view of himself, and the destructive consequences of his penchant for relentless demagoguery, would not be challenged here. (We can't speak to "conservative estimates" of a fortune that seem larger than the GNP of his destitute island nation.) Prosecutors and courts can address charges of crime--including courts outside the country, especially as the legal principle of Universal Jurisdiction takes hold. But throwing over elected leaders is the job of a country's own people, not the Washington establishment. America's credibility and leadership in the world continue to suffer blowback from the years of U.S. complicity in overthrowing democratic governments, from Chile to Iran.

[Byard Pidgeon]

The USA is rightfully reviled for its continuing interference in the internal governance of other nations. Our government has no right, other than the "right" conferred by having the most power to kill others, to determine what person or political philosophy is chosen by others...nor, in fact, to dictate who may or may not have a particular form or weaponry.

[Robert d'Amato]

The long history of U.S. support for military dictatorships in Latin America, mainly for the purpose of promoting U.S. commercial interests in those countries, tells a clear story of why the peoples of those countries distrust, fear and hate the U.S. It is a history of unparalleled brutality in places like Honduras, Guatamala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Chile, to name a few. These regimes were fully aided and abetted by the CIA, supported by members of Congress, and members of the State Department such as John Negroponte and Elliot Abrams. Most of the infamous "death squads" that operated there could not have done so without secret U.S. backing. Congressmen Burton and Rohrabacher, and their ilk, come from the same political gene pool. Were it any other country than the U.S., the people responsible for these crimes would be indicted and dragged before an international criminal court.