El Salvador: Si se pueda!

So, as alluded to in my last post, I just spent my spring break in San Salvador, El Salvador, on a trip through Marquette University’s Burke Program.  Our “delegation” (that’s what everyone kept calling us) consisted of 4 professors, 1 Burke alumnus, and 7 MU students, including 5 current Burke Scholars.  Rather focusing on doing community service, we spent our time engaging El Salvador’s rich and bloody history, particularly the ongoing involvement of both Roman Catholicism and the American government, interacting with Santa Clara University’s Casa service learning program, just plain being with people (both Salvadoran and American), and intentionally reflecting on our experiences in the light of our faith.

The crash summary goes something like this: we flew into the country on Saturday (March 7), worshiped with the Christian base community in the San Ramon neighborhood, visited peasant homes on the side of a volcano with a member of the base community, witnessed the sites of Archbishop Oscar Romero’s ministry and death, saw where Salvadoran troops gunned down six Jesuits and two women at the Jesuit University of Central America, met liberation theologian Fr. Dean Brackley, hung out with rural Salvadoran scholarship students, ate chocobananas and pupusas, went with Casa students to their service learning sites, nearly missed a flight, and, as Arundhati Roy would put it, those were just the small things.  I will put up pictures, more details, and some of my own musings on El Salvador, how this experience challenges my own faith and political beliefs, and how this reminded me afresh of how blessed I am to attend Marquette.

Shifting from my trip to the El Salvadoran presidential election this past Sunday (March 15), the leftist FMLN party to narrowly defeated the ruling rightist ARENA party for the first time in Salvadoran history!  Since the negotiated end of the civil war between the US-backed government (ARENA) and Marxist guerrillas (FMLN), ARENA has continued to hold power, amid charges of vote fraud from the left . . . until now.  President-elect Mauricio Funes is the FMLN’s first non-guerrilla presidential candidate and a former journalist.

But wait . . . why I am so excited that a bunch of leftist guerrilla fighters, including the vice-president elect, just came to power?  After all, I am a libertarian, already angry about the Bush and Obama failed bailouts.  Well, first of all, El Salvador lacks any real alternatives to either ARENA or FMLN, with only a few other parties on both the right and left which tend to align with the most similar major party.  (For the record, Costa Rica is home to perhaps the world’s most successful libertarian party, Partido Movimiento Libertario, which currently has 6 congressional seats, so it is not impossible fantasy to imagine a Salvadoran version.)  Both ARENA and FMLN plan to use the government actively, but I believe FMLN will do so more openly than the corrupt ARENA.  Additionally, Funes represents a victory for non-violence because he is the first major party candidate not associated with either the historically brutal security forces (ARENA) or the armed guerrilla movement (previous FMLN candidates).  I wish President-elect Funes all the best.  Si se pueda!