Salvadoran Political Hopeful Campaigns Among Exiles Here

A final Cold War front crumbled Friday as Salvadoran presidential contender Facundo Guardado, a former leftist guerrilla commander, became the latest Latin American politician to bring his campaign to California.

Just a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable for Washington to grant a U.S. visa for Guardado, who was a top commander of a guerrilla movement that so worried U.S. policymakers that they invested millions in U.S. aid and dozens of U.S. military advisors to help the Salvadoran army combat it.

The rebels laid down their arms in 1992 and embarked on a new offensive--at the ballot box. And today Guardado is following in the footsteps of Mexican politicians who are courting the clout and affluence of their compatriots in the United States.

Guardado’s U.S. debut began Thursday night when he shook hands with Salvadoran immigrant supporters in Los Angeles and Pasadena and urged them to take an active role in shaping the destiny of the impoverished homeland many of them fled during the 12-year war.

“I want to start a process by which the Salvadoran community here is part of the social and economic wealth of El Salvador,” Guardado, 44, told about 75 supporters at the Immanuel Presbyterian Church in the Mid-Wilshire district of Los Angeles.

Unlike Mexico, El Salvador has not taken steps to allow its emigres to vote in the March 7 election. But candidates are still eager to win the influence and financial support of the estimated 1-million-strong Salvadoran exile community, which sends $1.3 billion in remittances back to El Salvador--10% of the country’s GDP--every year, Guardado said.

In addition to campaign contributions, Guardado said he hopes that the U.S. Salvadorans can help persuade their relatives back home to vote, where Guardado is trailing in the presidential race. Polls show Guardado tied for third place, far behind the front-running candidate of the far-right Nationalist Republican Alliance, El Salvador’s ruling party.

Faced with that unpromising outlook, Guardado has pinned his hopes on the one-third of Salvadoran voters who polls say are undecided. The studies also show that supporters of Guardado’s party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, are increasingly declining to vote.

“It is the ‘undecided’ who will determine who wins this election,” Guardado told the crowd.

Guardado has traded his combat fatigues and M-16 for the rumpled suit and formal countenance of a typical Salvadoran bureaucrat. Nonetheless, the organizers of the Thursday meeting greeted everyone with a revolutionary salutation, “companero,” and the wounds of El Salvador’s fratricidal civil conflict clearly still weighed heavily on the minds of many of the exiles, some who have not returned to see their country in peacetime.

“I just want to know one thing: When you become president, will you punish the assassins?” asked a delicate-looking elderly Salvadoran woman who is still undergoing physical and psychological rehabilitation to overcome her rape and torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad in 1980--a reprisal for her involvement in a peaceful pro-democratic coalition.

Guardado sighed. The woman’s horrible ordeal is well known.

However, a general amnesty pushed through the Salvadoran legislative assembly by a right-wing political party pardons war criminals. Most of the beneficiaries were military men.

“I would like to promise life in prison for all the killers and torturers,” he replied. “But we are not contemplating opening investigations of the crimes during the war. We will work for a dignified existence for those widowed, orphaned and handicapped by the war, and for an end to impunity for the criminals who rob and kill.

“As Pope John Paul said, if you violate human rights, you start war,” Guardado said. “If you respect human rights, you bring about peace, and that is our aim.”

In an interview before the event, Guardado acknowledged that the governing style of another former rebel movement and longtime FMLN ally, Nicaragua’s leftist Sandinistas, may have undermined some of the FMLN’s traditional base of support in eastern El Salvador. The Sandinistas’ seizure of real estate and state funds at the end of their decade-long tenure became notoriously known as “la pinata.”

“Some people have said, you’re not going to govern like they did, are you?” Guardado said.

The FMLN is not the only party courting local Salvadorans. A few weeks ago, a conservative Salvadoran candidate made a swing through Los Angeles, underscoring the fluidity of an increasingly global American political arena which, like immigration, knows no borders.

Some U.S.-based Salvadorans at the Thursday event said they have even gone back to El Salvador to vote. Antonio Hernandez said he flew back to cast his vote for popular San Salvador Mayor Hector Silva in the 1996 midterm elections, which scored significant victories for the FMLN.

“Most of the Salvadoran immigrants here support the FMLN,” said Hernandez, who blames military allies for the murders of eight close family members in El Salvador.

If so, an analyst suggested, the immigrant flow may have drained FMLN support.

Maria Guardado--no relation to the candidate--seemed typical of the FMLN militants at the event. Guardado, 63, said she was tortured for three days by a death squad in 1980 and left for dead at a roadside, her spine fractured, a wrist and two ribs broken, with a concussion. “We must support the FMLN candidates, do anything possible so that these kinds of things don’t happen again,” she said.