Posted on 02/17/2004 1:47:14 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Salvadorans think that on March 21 they will elect a new president and a new government, but the matter is a lot more dramatic than that. The choice is not between two parties within the same democratic family but between two value systems, two economic models and two concepts of the political reality and international alliances, all of them totally different.
One of the two candidates with the best chances of winning is Shafik Handal:a 74-year-old diehard communist, a nostalgic survivor of the Cold War personally linked to the terrible period of violence that cost the country more than 70,000 dead, a man who clings stubbornly to a ''revolutionary'' vision of social problems who is a lot closer to Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro than to Lula da Silva's vegetarian socialism.
The other is Tony Saca: a young man of 39, a sports writer and successful radio entrepreneur, an advocate of the market economy and good relations with the United States who did not personally participate in any bloody event during the civil war.
Five weeks before the elections, Saca is several percentage points ahead of Handal. But that margin tends to shrink, and the number of undecided voters suggests that it's not impossible for Handal to achieve a majority.
Were that to happen, El Salvador would enter into a terrible period of economic crisis and social upheaval worse than the one in Venezuela, because El Salvador does not have oil resources to bankroll costly revolutionary utopias.
Success story
Most ironic about this tragic dilemma is that it should not even exist. For the past 15 years, Salvadorans have been the protagonists in one of the most successful of all transitions to democracy in the world. First, President Alfredo Cristiani managed to curb his own army and forged peace agreements with the communist guerrillas.
Later, during the government of Armando Calderón Sol, the guerrillas' assimilation into the democratic model deepened, and the leftists gained widespread representation in Parliament and in municipal governments. Finally, the administration of Paco Flores, despite terrible natural catastrophes, has achieved unprecedented rates of growth, reduction in the poverty indexes and economic stability within a climate of austerity and decency that even his enemies give him credit for.
These are the objective data that lead to this categorical statement: The past 15 years have been the best years in the whole tragic history of the smallest and proportionally most overpopulated country in Spanish-speaking America.
So why does a substantial sector of the Salvadoran people toy irresponsibly with the possibility of dashing to the ground all that has been so laboriously achieved? Most likely because three consecutive terms in government have worn out the Arena Party, despite its ability to renew itself and its dynamic internal democracy.
But there is another factor that also has a bearing on the subject: The ''zombie ideas,'' a concept coined by Spanish Foreign Minister Ana Palacio. As is well known, zombies are the living dead created by popular imagination. And, just as some creatures supposedly wander through the planet who can move and breathe despite being dead, some wrong and counterproductive ideas discredited by reality continue to influence certain people who are immune to the effects of experience.
That happens in Latin America with, for example, price controls, anti-Americanism, the illusions that bring about forceful and interventionist states or the calming superstition that our woes always are the result of an evil conspiracy plotted abroad. Such is the case of Handal, a political zombie whose zombie ideas continue to seduce one third of the voters in his country.
The lesson taught to us by the Salvadoran episode -- a lesson that we'll see again in the forthcoming elections in Uruguay, Nicaragua and Mexico -- is that the most urgent task for Latin America's thinking people is of a didactic nature. The worst enemies of democratic stability and economic development in the region are ``zombie ideas.''
As long as charlatans have an audience, applause and votes, freedom and prosperity are in danger. And, judging from all symptoms, in only two countries in our culture have ''zombie ideas'' been almost totally eradicated by their societies' political maturity: Spain and Chile.
Elsewhere, every time there's a summons to the polls, we gamble with the system. At times, even with our lives.
This is true. These last years under the PP have been Spain's most successful period in living memory, and Chile (although it too is under attack from "zombie ideas") is about the only sucess story going in South America.
I sure hope the good guys win in El Salvador. The last thing we need is another zombie-infested socialist prison - er, paradise down there.
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