El Salvador 2006: Elections in a Broken Nation

The crowd chant referred to Schafik Jorge Handal, who was stricken by a heart attack and died on January 24, on the way home from the inauguration of Evo Morales, the recently elected President of Bolivia. Schafik, at 75, was a member of the Communist Party of El Salvador (PCS) from a very young age and had 50 years of history in the struggle for social change in El Salvador. In the 1970's, he was a member of the National Opposition Union (UNO) that won elections in 1972 and 1977. In each case, the elections were simply stolen by fraud from the UNO by the military governments as waves of repression swept the country. In 1980, the PCS joined the FMLN in an armed struggle that fought the Salvadoran and United States military to a standoff. Schafik was part of the negotiating team out of which came the Peace Accords of 1992, and then became part of the leadership of the FMLN political party that has steadily gained in strength in the years since the Peace Accords. In 2004, he was the FMLN candidate for President, and was maligned as a terrorist by the opposition ARENA party, as the United States pursued a policy of intimidation to ensure the FMLN would not attain the Presidency of El Salvador.

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