Radicals in El Salvador

Although the left-wing FMLN heads the National Assembly, and its candidate Mauricio Funes became president in 2009, there are a vocal group of young radicals in El Salvador who advocate for more revolutionary change.  Their anger focuses on the role of the US in Salvadoran affairs and the military and police tactics of their government fighting a tremendous crime problem.

An article titled Dispatch From El Salvador: Obama’s Drug War Feels Eerily Familiar looks at the discontent of the far-left in the country:

Watching this army of cell phone-wielding protesters through the smoke of rickety buses, it feels eerily like 1980, the year El Salvador’s civil war started, after U.S.-trained death squads murdered Monsenor Oscar Arnulfo Romero—the country’s ultimate symbol of peace, and of the consequences of militarization. Then, the militarization of society was driven by political ideologies; today, it is driven by the purported war on drugs. In both cases, the driving force has been Washington, D.C.’s agenda—and its guns....

For Ana Maria and many of her generation of radical Salvadorenas, Obama has replaced Ronald Reagan as the new face of danger on the tank and troop-filled streets of San Salvador. The military is the centerpiece of Obama’s El Salvador agenda. His Central American Citizen’s Security Partnership offers $200 million in technical assistance and aid to military-security forces, which he says will “confront the narco-traffickers and gangs that have caused so much violence.” Students believe the initiative is once again militarizing daily life, under cover of drug wars. (Read more).

The radicals are not numerically significant, but they do like to take to the streets. Opinion polls, however, show that most Salvadorans are centrists at heart.