Francisco Flores Spins a Yarn about his Record 

by Joe DeRaymond

Francisco Guillermo Flores Pérez at Lafayette on September 17

     Francisco Flores’ lecture at Lafayette College on September 17, 2007 was a surreal exercise in the interpretation of reality. It is not unusual to hear a politician spin his time in office in the best possible light. It was bizarre to listen to a man describe current day El Salvador in glowing terms, in terms of success, as an exercise in the application of liberty.  

     Missing from Mr. Flores analysis was any mention of the name of his political party, ARENA, or the fact that the single largest element in El Salvador’s economy today are the remittances sent back from emigrants working in the United States. 

     Here are some highlights of his speech, with comments in italics: 

     “Every day we build three schools. Every day we build 106 low-income houses, and every week we build a new health clinic.”   (The communities we visited in March needed schools badly, see La Loma.  Housing is deficient, and often provisional, and very expensive in San Salvador due to the artificial inflation caused by the $3 billion dollars in remittances.  People invariably have to travel a long distance to see a doctor.  We did not see one government-built clinic in a community.)

     “Conditions in El Salvador have changed rapidly. Telephone lines have multiplied 12 fold. Vehicles have increased 4 fold. Water supply and electricity in the rural areas are 50% up. It is now possible to acquire a low income house for as low as 48$ a month. From socialist dictatorship, we now have a vibrant economy.” (Cell phones are the norm, actually, if you can get service.  Water is at a premium in many places.  Housing is not available for $48 a month to my knowledge.)

     “We ended the isolation of all our poor villages and left El Salvador with the best road network in the region…and my popularity rose again.” (Complete nonsense.)

     The reality of Francisco Flores is the reality of a person in a severe state of self-delusion, or of a person without relationship to the truth. There is no doubt that he wants to be careful about the history he presents, as witnessed by his avoidance of the word ARENA, or of his revisionist history of the war years, presented as a struggle against communism, without regard to the century-long domination of the society by a very small group of super-rich families, and the aspirations of a people for a piece of their national wealth.

      Here is the flyer we handed out prior to his lecture, on the steps of the Williams Center for the Arts. We refer the reader to our El Salvador 2007 section for more on the reality of El Salvador and its relationship to the US today. 

Francisco Flores – Just Another Frontman for ARENA? 

     From 1999-2004, Francisco Guillermo Flores Pérez took his turn as ARENA President of El Salvador. ARENA stands for “Alianza Republicana Nacionalista”, or Nationalist Republican Alliance. The party was founded in the early 1980´s by members of the Salvadoran oligarchy, who were threatened with their loss of privilege by workers, peasants and students who were demanding equal rights in a free society. 

     ARENA embarked on a strategy of terror and assassination against dissidents, coupled with a political program that would allow them to control the public institutions of El Salvador. Its public leader was Roberto D’Aubuisson. it is estimated that 80,000 were killed by death squads in the years of the civil conflict, between 1979 and 1992.  Roberto D’Aubuisson is still a hero to Francisco Flores and the ARENA Party. Although he died in 1992, of esophageal cancer, he remains the ideological avatar of the Party. Recently, Flores spoke at the funeral of Eduardo D’Aubuisson, son of Roberto and a member of the Central American Parliament. Eduardo was murdered in February of 2007 in Guatemala, by members of the Guatemalan Police Force. Roberto D’Aubuisson has been identified as one of the intellectual authors of the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and is credited with personally forming the death squads that still terrorize Salvadoran society.   

Current ARENA President Tony Saca with a photo of the ideological beacon of the Party, Roberto D'Aubuisson

The Flores Record

      The press release announcing Mr. Flores appearance at Lafayette states that he was responsible for “an unprecedented reduction in poverty”. Here’s a characterization of El Salvador’s economic situation from the World Bank; “slower growth in the second half of the 1990s and the early 2000s has meant that average per capita incomes have barely grown over the last several years, observably slowing poverty reduction and socio-economic progress since 2000.” When Mr. Flores, with the strong support of the Bush administration, attempted to become the President of the OAS in 2005, he was rejected by the member nations. The reasons were a general distrust of his competency level,  and a lingering cloud of suspicion about the corruption associated with any ARENA President. 

     In late 2005, a report from the University of Central America stated the following, according to the periodical Envio, “Salvadoran public administration is not transparent and has never tried to be, as proved by the deep-rooted nature of the most pernicious forms of corruption. The successive ARENA governments have tolerated this corruption, largely because the very structure of these governments is conceived to allow its proliferation.” “ARENA has had ample opportunities and time to contain corruption in the over 15 years that the party has exercised almost absolute control over the state. But it has been unable to do so, and shown little interest in the task. The challenge is greater than its capacity and power, with serious consequences for national life.” 

     Principles of Freedom?  

     The Flores visit to Lafayette is titled “Making Small Nations Great through the Principles of Freedom”. For President Flores, freedom lay entirely in the idea of a free market. He was a proponent of privatization, and manipulated the economy by sponsoring the dollarization of the currency. He was responsible for changing the currency to the US dollar, and taking the colon out of circulation. This was a blow to the poor, as they struggled to deal with a conversion meant to benefit the banking class. 

     Flores also signed the CAFTA treaty, which was implemented in March of 2006. According to Salvadoran sociologist Raul Moreno, in the first year of CAFTA exports decreased 2.5%, while imports from the US increased 5.3%. The commercial deficit with the United States increased 24% from 872 million to 1.08 billion dollars (from the December, 2006 Statistical Bulletin of the Central Reserve Bank). In the case of the agricultural sector, in 2005, without CAFTA, there was a 49% increase in exports. In 2006, under CAFTA, there was a 3.75 drop in exports. 

     Those areas that showed an increase improved because of better prices, as happened with coffee, not because of CAFTA. 

     Mr. Flores opposed unions and tried to destroy a healthcare workers union that was trying to represent workers employed in the public hospitals, the only healthcare available to the majority of Salvadorans. The manufacturing, or maquila sector employed about 90,000 workers during Flores’ term. There was not one union representing these workers, who earn about $160 a month for full time labor in difficult conditions.  

Crime and Emigration

     During the term of Flores, El Salvador continued to experience one of the highest homicide and crime rates in the world. There were prison riots, an increase in gang activity, and a general sense of chaos in the streets. Mr. Flores instituted a policy of “mano dura” or “hard hand” against gang members, which resulted in many arrests of youth, but no change in the social polarization dynamic. 

     As the society seemed to literally come apart at the seams, emigration increased. In 2005, the homicide rate was 59 per 100,000, an epidemic of murder. Jobs are difficult to find and pay very little. Thousands each month fled and continue to flee the ravaged economy and social situation for the promise of work in the United States. 

     Today, approximately 2 million Salvadorans, or 25% of the population, live and work in the US. The money they send back in “remesas” or remittances, is the single largest part of the economy, larger than both the agricultural and maquila sector combined. Remesas today total $3 billion a year, and are a lifeline for the economy. This is not an economy based on “freedom” for El Salvador, but is instead an economy based on the exploitation of the human wealth of a nation.   

 The “Freedom” Legacy of Flores 

     On July 2 of this year, 14 community leaders were arrested in Suchitoto, El Salvador, for organizing a peaceful protest against President Tony Saca’s water privatization policies. Riot police, with military support, shot rubber bullets and used tear gas against  non-violent protesters. 

     Those arrested were jailed and charged under a new terrorism statute that could result in long prison terms. Today, 13 of them are out on bail, awaiting trial on the terrorism charges. One was released. This process has brought the criticism of the international community, including human rights groups who have noted that this is not a case of terrorism, but the repression of civil dissent. 

     On September 4, 8 trade union members of the hospital workers union SIGEESAL were arrested for a protest on July 6. Between 6 and 7 a.m. on September 4th special groups of the Civilian National Police carried out an operation where the trade unionists were captured in their homes and their work places - national hospitals and public health clinics. They were charged, this time, not with a terrorism law, but with a disorderly conduct statute recently enacted by the ARENA-controlled Assembly. The sentence can be as much as 10 years in prison.