Salvadoran Mayor in L.A. to Tap Into Global Economy

His political party once spurned capitalism and launched guerrilla warfare against the U.S.-backed government of El Salvador.

This weekend, though, Hector Silva, a leading representative of El Salvador’s FMLN--the former guerrilla group turned political party--has come to Southern California armed with a far different ideology, based on the importance of a free global economy.

“We can regulate it [the market],” Silva said Saturday during a conference on Central America at Loyola Marymount University. “We can make sure it is done in terms that benefit us. But we can’t stop it.”

Silva, mayor of his nation’s capital of San Salvador and the standard-bearer for the leftist Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front--FMLN are its Spanish initials--said foreign money is needed to rebuild his war-ravaged country.

His words underscored the evolution of the FMLN since the front laid down its arms in 1992 and shifted its sights from the battlefield to the ballot box.

In fact, the unabashed goal of Silva’s three-day swing through California is to attract U.S. investors to a nation still recuperating from the devastating effects of a 12-year civil war.

During his stay, the popular mayor will be meeting privately with bankers, business executives from the Silicon Valley, the entertainment industry and other fields, and representatives of the huge Salvadoran immigrant community concentrated in Los Angeles.

“The key is to go along with globalization as far and as long as we can benefit from it,” said Silva, 54.

Traveling with Silva is Facundo Guardado, a onetime FMLN military commander and unsuccessful presidential candidate in 1999.

The mayor’s appearance here is yet another example of how immigrant communities in Los Angeles and elsewhere have come to play increasingly important political and economic roles in their homelands.

Yet his vision of the global economy is tempered by the reality of social inequality. The mayor lamented the fact that one-quarter of San Salvador’s metropolitan population of 2 million live in extreme poverty.

“I don’t think we can move forward without addressing the problem of poverty,” Silva said in an interview after his formal address.

His appearance at Loyola, a Jesuit institution, was fitting for a man educated at Jesuit schools in San Salvador. He was a friend of six Jesuits who were assassinated in San Salvador in 1989.

The mayor, who addressed the audience in fluent English, is a gynecologist who completed his residency at the University of Michigan and earned a degree in health administration from Johns Hopkins University. He was born in Boston of Salvadoran parents; his father was studying at Harvard at the time.

Silva was reelected mayor last year in an election that also saw the FMLN win more seats in the National Assembly than any other party. The mayor is expected to be a leading candidate in 2004 for the presidency of his nation of 6 million.

He stressed the importance of maintaining ties with expatriates in the United States. About a quarter of the Salvadoran population fled their homeland during the war, mostly to the U.S. By some estimates, as many as 500,000 Salvadoran immigrants and Salvadoran Americans reside in Southern California.

“A priority for us is to reach out to Salvadorans here,” Silva said.

Today, the $1.6 billion annually sent back by those expatriates is by far the major source of income in El Salvador and is roughly twice the amount brought in by the country’s largest export, coffee.

But generating investment is Silva’s main theme here. The mayor said foreign capital helped finance San Salvador’s first sanitary landfill, as well as new bus stops, and said he wants more.

“We can’t hide ourselves from the global economy,” Silva said. “We must make it work for us.”