FMLN victory a step back

Carlos Alberto Montaner

Most of the surveys indicate that the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) will win the March 15 elections in El Salvador. The FMLN is controlled by the communists, as has been repeatedly explained by some of its most important former leaders, Facundo Guardado and Joaquín Villalobos, battle-hardened comandantes in the guerrilla struggle of the 1980s and today's Social-Democratic militants.

Originally, the FMLN was an insurrectional umbrella organization that sheltered several leftist groups, but the hard-liners took over in an implacable manner until they neutralized or expelled any members who did not subscribe to their vision of society, their ideological theories and the most orthodox political tactics.

This is the first time in Latin America that a communist organization will reach the presidency through democratic elections. True, its candidate is an independent politician, journalist Mauricio Funes, an able and eloquent man. But it is also true that he is escorted by a vice president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, and a parliamentary delegation who answer wholeheartedly to the FMLN.

There is, therefore, no room for doubt: If the FMLN wins the election, as is likely to happen, the communists are the ones who will achieve power. And they will try to do what José Luis Merino, the group's theoretician, said in a candid interview: ``No, we are not an alternation; we are an alternative. Our role is to take power, conquer the whole nation and make sure our form of government does not change. Not with bayonets or persecution, of course. There are examples, like Venezuela, that are our models.''

Judging from Merino's statements, the FMLN is interested in governing so it may join the ''21st-century socialism'' bandwagon led by Hugo Chávez. That means dismantling the republican institutions that divide authority into powers that serve as mutual checks and balances. It means giving a caudillo the constitutional legitimacy he wants to become an eternal president; it means tremendously expanding the perimeter of the state's economic activity, bitterly opposing the United States, allying the nation with Iran and the Palestinian radicals and building large networks of popular support through patronage.

Cure worse than illness

What's curious is that the huge majority of the Salvadorans who will vote for the FMLN will do so for other, totally different reasons. They want more jobs, better pay, lower prices and an effective control over the terrible street violence that has turned El Salvador into a country with one of the world's worst crime statistics.

In other words, almost all of the pro-FMLN voters wish to improve their living conditions and perfect the system of freedoms in which they live, but they're going to vote for the benefit of a party that's interested in changing the system and staging a revolution that goes in a direction different from the one desired.

That political transaction is like going to a doctor for treatment of a headache, but choosing a surgeon who is convinced that the body's ills are cured by amputating the patient's legs. Why such a contradiction?

• Because it is not true that voters elect their representatives carefully and wisely. History is full of examples that confirm this melancholy statement.

• Because the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) has headed the government for four consecutive terms, generating an enormous erosion. And although those have been the best 20 years in El Salvador's republican history, the most prosperous, stable and free (if you don't agree, please point to two better decades), there has been no shortage of corruption and wrong decisions that have translated into a slower reduction of poverty.

Obviously, the FMLN's victory -- if not prevented by that 14 percent of the voters who are still undecided -- will multiply all the ills plaguing El Salvador. Those ills can be alleviated only with investments of capital, with education, the creation of businesses, political tranquillity, good international relations, common sense and honesty in governance. None of that exists in the Bolivarian chaos that the Salvadoran communists wish to emulate. It is clear that very few people learn from the mistakes of others