Caribbean & Central America - January 2016 (ISSN 1741-4458)

El Salvador’s main opposition is accusing the government led by President Salvador Sánchez Cerén of creating Venezuelan-style popular bodies in an attempt to circumvent the country’s elected authorities. The right-wing Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (Arena) alleges that the government is using public funds to advance party political guidelines of the ruling left-wing Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN) presented during the party’s national congress between 6 and 8 November 2015. The FMLN brusquely dismissed the allegations, insisting that “a thief always judges others by his own standards”. The allegations come at the same time as former president Francisco Flores (1999-2004), of Arena, is going on trial for embezzlement.

Venezuelan-style assemblies created
The most significant party ‘guideline’ presented during the FMLN’s national congress last November, attended by some 20,000 members, is number 31, relating to the creation of popular blocs, or citizen assemblies. It stipulates that “a new society will be possible if it is transformed from the root…The great challenge of the FMLN is to be capable of leading and accompanying the people in this task. To overcome this challenge, it is necessary to build a bloc of ideological and political popular movements…needed to advance the revolutionary democratic transition”.

President Sánchez Cerén swore in the representatives of the citizen assemblies one month after the convention, on 7 December, describing them in the process as “a new model of participation”. In essence, their remit seems to be to perform an advisory role for the government. Sánchez Cerén stressed that “dialogue and social organisation is a fundamental pillar of government policy”.

Composed of 2,570 representatives of different communities nationwide, these citizen assemblies will inform the government of social problems, needs and priorities in each area. Ten ‘leaders’ (seven permanent members and three alternates) will be elected as representatives of local social organisations including, inter alia, communal groups, youth committees, women’s committees, cooperatives and associations of producers within each citizen assembly.

All of the members of these municipal citizen assemblies within each department will make up a departmental citizen assembly, which will elect one member to represent them before a national consultative council. This council will include representatives of the interior ministry, the secretary for citizen participation and transparency, and the technical secretary. So far, 257 municipal citizen assemblies have been formed and 14 departmental citizen assemblies. This correlates almost exactly with the number of municipalities (262) and departments (14) in El Salvador.

Arena is running scared that this is an attempt by the FMLN administration to undercut elected authorities in El Salvador, and to set up ‘communal councils’ as in Venezuela. It fears that the FMLN administration will later seek to transform the citizen assemblies into a powerful parliament to supplant not just mayoralties but also the legislative branch of government. This would be consistent with what the Venezuelan opposition is speculating that the government led by President Nicolás Maduro is endeavouring to do now in response to the adverse results achieved by the ruling Bolivarian Revolution in the legislative elections on 6 December last year when the opposition won a two-thirds majority in the national assembly which began sitting on 5 January.

“These ‘base committees’ are being financed with budgetary funds and do not have a public policy in mind but rather have the end of politico-ideological indoctrination as part of a poor copy of the ‘base committees’ in Venezuela and Ecuador, from Chavismo and 21^st century socialism,” Arena Legislative Deputy René Portillo Cuadra said in response to the creation of the new citizen assemblies.

The secretary general of the FMLN, Medardo González, specifically said during his speech at the national congress that government officials should be more active in party issues. Guideline 119, for instance, stipulates that ‘All leaders, officials and FMLN members without exception must belong to a committee and actively participate in its tasks’.

The president of the powerful (pro-Arena) private business lobby Asociación Nacional de la Empresa Privada (Anep), Jorge Daboub, savaged the new citizen assemblies: “The FMLN is not only using public resources…but they are also manipulating and making duplicitous institutions that should be resolving the problems of the public. They are creating a parallel State.”

Arnoldo Marín, a deputy for the moderate centre-right Partido Demócrata Cristiano (PDC), also accused the government of “double standards”, channelling state funds to the FMLN party grassroots. FMLN Deputy Jackeline Rivera was dismissive of the allegations, accusing Arena of “fantasies” and “scaremongering”.

Distraction from Flores corruption case?
Arena could be seeking to distract public attention from the forthcoming trial of former president Flores. Flores stands accused of misappropriating US$5m of Taiwanese donations intended for earthquake relief and social programmes while he was president and funnelling a further US$10m into Arena party coffers to fund the party’s electoral campaign in 2004 when its candidate, Tony Saca, came to power.

Flores did a good job of incriminating himself during his two appearances before a special commission of the legislative assembly looking into the Taiwanese donations in February 2014. Flores admitted he had received cheques in his name but claimed that he had handed them over. He revealed details on neither the amount received nor the date when it reached its recipients, whose safety, he claimed, would be compromised if he did. Flores said the donations constituted payments in exchange for El Salvador’s support of Taiwan in the United Nations (UN). The commission’s final 130-page report recommended that the attorney general’s office investigate Flores for bribery; illicit negotiations; embezzlement; money and asset laundering; and false testimony related to the “non-traditional” donations.

On 18 December 2015, an appeals court dropped the charges of money laundering against Flores. It also allowed Flores to be transferred from the prison of the counter-narcotics division of the national police (DAN), where he had been sent two weeks earlier, to house arrest while awaiting trial. The FMLN expressed its “indignation” at the judicial ruling. The NGOs Iniciativa Social para la Democracia (ISD) and Fundación de Estudios para la Aplicación del Derecho (Fespad) accused the appeals court of exceeding its authority, arguing that its resolution contained “incongruities and irregularities that should [themselves] be the subject of an investigation”.

The case against Flores was scheduled to commence on 18 January but it has been delayed. On 7 January, the San Salvador court handling the case decided to postpone it “until further notice” because of complications with some of the foreign witnesses.

• Citizen assemblies

The new citizen assemblies are described by the FMLN as “plural and permanent spaces for dialogue, planning and coordination between social actors and public institutions to take strategic decisions to orientate and guarantee participative management in territorial development”.

• Earthquake donations

Awkwardly for former president Flores, inhabitants of Las Colinas, a neighbourhood of Santa Tecla (a municipality in La Libertad department just outside San Salvador) which was devastated by the 2001 earthquake, claimed in a press conference that they had “never received any money” from Flores as part of the Taiwanese donations. The earthquake claimed nearly 1,000 lives and left over 100,000 people homeless.