Americans sometimes take for granted democratic and peaceful successions of power, and as the media obsesses on President Barack Obama, a political transformation could be taking place in El Salvador.

Since the early 1990s, developments in El Salvador have typically gone unnoticed. For example, it's been three days (at the time of this writing) since El Salvador's January municipal and legislative elections, and the New York Times has yet to run a story on them. Even Foreign Policy magazine neglected to include El Salvador in its Web exclusive article "Elections to Watch in 2009."

Elections in Bolivia, Israel, South Africa, the Palestinian Authority, India, Iran, Mexico, Sudan, Germany, and Afghanistan were highlighted, but tiny El Salvador slipped under the author’s radar. The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and the Miami Herald, however, have been covering the story.

In fact, El Salvador’s two national elections are important because they may indicate the consolidation of democracy and repudiation of extremist politics in a country with very close ties to the United States. Moreover, the possible election, in March, of a leftist as El Salvador’s next president could become a foreign policy challenge for the Obama administration.

El Salvador, with a current population of nearly 7 million people (almost a third of whom live in the United States), is one of the poorest, least developed countries in the Western Hemisphere. According to the 2007/2008 Human Development Report, El Salvador has a GDP per capita of $5,255 and has only slightly better living conditions than Bolivia, Honduras, Nicaragua or Guatemala.

The Salvadoran economy is locked with the United States through the US-Central America-Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement, and remittance flows are a significant source of revenue for the country. In 2008, remittances totaled $3.8 billion, up $92 million since 2007, with nearly a quarter of all families in El Salvador regularly receiving money from abroad. Interestingly, due to such tight economic linkages, the Salvadoran government dollarized the economy in 2001.

Tragically, El Salvador experienced one of the most vicious Cold War proxy conflicts of the 20th century. During the 12-year war the United States provided approximately $7 billion in foreign and military aid to El Salvador’s right-wing government. Furthermore, U.S. military advisors in El Salvador and at the School of the Americas (SOA) trained thousands of Salvadoran military personnel, several of whom can be directly linked to death squads and a litany of atrocities. The assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, the murder of six Jesuit priests and the rape-murder of three Maryknoll nuns are the most horrific and publicly recognized killings.

However, frequent massacres of Salvadoran civilians are even more shocking. For example, in the town of El Mozote members of the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion brutally murdered over 1,000 innocent civilians, including the elderly, pregnant women, adolescents, and at least 100 children less than ten years of age.

At least 60 SOA-trained Salvadoran military officers can be listed as “notorious” violators of human rights, and there can be no denying US indirect involvement in at least some of the war crimes committed in El Salvador. Thankfully, a Spanish judge recently agreed to prosecute 14 Salvadoran Army members accused in the murder of the six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter. Uncovering the truth in such cases is always complicated. There can be so many multiple “realities” when it comes to complex historical events like civil wars.

Moreover, it’s next to impossible to develop a solid rapport with Salvadorans without expressing some understanding of the 12-year civil conflict and U.S. involvement. Whether one is talking to a former leftist guerrilla or a member of the Salvadoran military, some knowledge of the trauma and suffering must be expressed, even it means masking personal political leanings.

The leftist insurgency’s origins can be traced to the 1960s when peasants and reformers began directly confronting the landed oligarchy, the famous “Fourteen Families,” and challenging a series of corrupt right-wing, military-backed governments. The  Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMNL, was founded in 1980 in honor of an insurgent hero killed by the National Guard in 1932 and as an umbrella organization for five leftist political-guerilla groups.

The conflict began to escalate in 1980 after the assassination of Romero to eventually embroil the country in a 12-year civil war. Cold War paranoia, exacerbated by the 1979 victory of the leftist Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and President Reagan’s public promise to never let another country in the hemisphere fall to the communists led to US interventions throughout the region. Furthermore, paranoia mixed with hubris kept Washington from seeing El Salvador’s internal conflict as it really was - a legitimate peasant rebellion.

The civil war claimed at least 75,000 lives, eventually ending in a stalemate when peace accords were signed in 1992. Considering how much aid and support the US gave to the right-wing Salvadoran government, the stalemate really should be seen as a victory for the FMLN, whose candidate may just win the presidency in March.

On January 18, Salvadorans elected 262 municipal seats, 84 representatives to the Legislative Assembly and 20 representatives to the Central American Parliament. The results indicate the FMLN made notable gains in the Assembly, winning five more seats to hold 37. The right-wing ARENA (Nationalist Republican Alliance), party dropped from 34 to 32 seats, with three smaller parties holding those that remain.

Nonetheless, the FMLN suffered the unexpected loss of San Salvador to the ARENA mayoral candidate. Physician Norman Quijano succeeded in frustrating incumbent Violeta Menjivar’s aspirations, thus ending 12 years of continuous FMLN control of the capital. Quijano’s surprising victory could mean the battle for the presidency will be a much tighter fight than the polls are indicating.

The ARENA party pulled out all the stops in its attempt to regain the second most powerful elected office in the country. Salvadorans were bombarded with right-wing propaganda meant to scare people into not voting for the FMLN. Some ads suggested the US government would sever relations with El Salvador and deport Salvadorans working in the United States, thereby cutting off the flow of remittances. Such suggestions are not outlandish. Because of real or perceived US meddling in El Salvador’s last presidential election, approximately 150 academics that specialize in Latin America signed an open letter against US intervention in the elections.

There were also absurd intimations coming from the ARENA government that leftist guerrilla groups were organizing in the mountains to come to the aid of FMLN candidates. Similar propaganda tactics can be expected in the lead-up to the March elections.

The FMLN presidential candidate, Mauricio Funes, is a former television journalist and a moderate leftist. Unlike all other FMLN presidential candidates, Funes was never a guerrilla commander. However, right-wingers claim he is either a closet communist or is too weak to resist party hard-liners, and a Wall Street Journal article noted that the FMLN vice-presidential candidate, Sánchez Cerén, is of “the more traditional (i.e., militant FMLN variety).” Funes’s opponents further argue he would eventually align his government with the leftist regimes in Bolivia, Cuba, and Venezuela. The ARENA candidate, Rodrigo Ávila, is also a moderate, even though he once was the deputy director of the National Police. His detractors say he will only represent the interests of wealthy Salvadoran elites. The fact that neither candidate is a true extremist bodes very well for the future of El Salvador.

The ARENA party has held the presidency continuously since defeating the Christian Democratic candidate in 1989. Hard-line conservatives founded it in 1981. The FMLN achieved significant electoral victories in the March 2003 municipal and legislative elections due to ARENA infighting and possibly to a poor government response to the 2001 earthquakes. However, the ARENA presidential candidate, “Tony” Saca, handily defeated the FMLN candidate, Shafik Handal in 2004. Saca’s tenure as president has been plagued by increasing gang violence and mounting food and gas prices, which may contribute to the widely predicted success of the FMLN candidate in March.

Vincent T. Gawronski is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Birmingham-Southern College. He first became enamored of El Salvador while evaluating a temporary shelter program funded by USAID in the wake of the 2001 earthquakes. He also made several field research trips in 2003-2004 to evaluate President Clinton’s Central American Mitigation Initiative. He will be serving as a credentialed observer for the March presidential elections and can be reached at vgawrons@bsc.edu.