El Salvador’s last leftist bastions mourn the demise of FMLN party
President Bukele gains a rival’s territory, leaving it with no voice in the assembly.
SAN JOSÉ LAS FLORES, El Salvador — Nestled in the mountains of northern El Salvador, near the Honduras border, San José Las Flores has been a bastion of leftist resistance for decades.
Now its residents, many of them veterans of the country’s civil war, fret over the seemingly imminent demise of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, the party born of the conflict and a powerful national political force for three decades.
The party’s red flags still flutter from light poles along the town’s sloping streets, but the FMLN is on its last legs, devastated by its ineptness in governing, corruption and the scorched-earth politics of President Nayib Bukele, the millennial force of nature it helped launch.
In only five years, the FMLN went from holding El Salvador’s presidency to garnering a paltry 6% of the vote as Bukele — now with his own party, New Ideas — romped to reelection last month. Worse, for the first time since its inception, FMLN will not have a vote in the Legislative Assembly after being shut out in congressional elections.
“These results show that they don’t represent any important sector of the population anymore,” said economist and political analyst Julia Evelyn Martínez, who tried to launch a coalition candidacy against Bukele. “The FMLN has a revolutionary, socialist discourse, and it attracted a lot of people — professionals, university students — because it had a leftist agenda, certain principles that the people said, ‘I identify with this.’ But now that has all been lost.”
The conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA, is not far behind; it won only two congressional seats in the 60-seat Legislative Assembly. Its last two presidents were jailed for corruption. The bungling of the two traditional parties created a vacuum that was filled by Bukele.
For the FMLN, what had remained were a handful of municipalities, such as San José Las Flores in Chalatenango. But Bukele and his allies have come for those too. El Salvador’s congress, already under his sway, passed reforms last year that reduced the number of municipalities in the country from 262 to 44. Following Sunday’s municipal elections, the FMLN lost the 10 municipalities it had controlled for several decades in the Chalatenango department, a stronghold of the guerrilla movement.
On a recent day, a blue banner hung over a street urging voters to support the candidate from Bukele’s New Ideas Party.
Modesto Ayala Zamora, a 55-year-old who was a combatant of the defunct Popular Liberation Forces guerrilla force, dismissed the recent elections as a fraud — Bukele ran despite a constitutional ban on reelection — but recognized the toll on the FMLN.
“We’re sort of between a rock and a hard place, a bit beaten down,” he said. “They are going to continue beating us; they will keep trying to make us disappear. We are not going to disappear, because we’re going to keep fighting even though it is difficult.”
Ironically, the FMLN gave Bukele his start. He won the mayor’s office of Nuevo Cuscatlán as a 23year-old, then the top post in the capital, San Salvador. Seeing the opportunity to chart his path as a populist, independent of the country’s increasingly discredited traditional parties, he engineered his ejection from the FMLN and went for the presidency.
As president, Bukele has railed against FMLN corruption and pursued its former leaders. The FMLN’s last president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén, fled to Nicaragua to escape prosecution. He joined his predecessor, Mauricio Funes, who received asylum and, eventually, Nicaraguan citizenship after being accused of massive corruption in El Salvador.
In January, Bukele, who excels at spectacle, demolished the massive Monument to Reconciliation erected under Sánchez Cerén’s administration to mark the 25th anniversary of the end of the civil war. He wrote on X that the monument had “glorified the pact between murderers of our people to divide the cake among themselves.”
Seated in her small office, San José Las Flores Mayor Buenaventura Tobar conceded that Bukele’s relentless accusations of corruption have shaken the FMLN.
Tobar, 54, has been affiliated with the social base that produced the party since she was 15. Now finishing her second three-year term as mayor in a town with few resources — one primary school and no gas station — she insisted that the party could recover, even while recognizing the damage.
“That message [of corruption] really resonated, reached a lot of sectors, reached the veterans, reached the whole population, and that made our people believe it in some way and start to hate the party,” Tobar said. “It penetrated the base and all of our sympathizers and our friends, causing them to lose confidence in the party.”
To regain that trust, Tobar said, the party’s leadership must regroup and listen to the base. But so far, there has been no guidance from the leaders about how to reverse last month’s electoral disaster that left them without a voice in congress.
“We have to really think about that. It’s the first time we’re left without representation, but it’s also an important message that we have to assess,” Tobar said.
Sitting under a tree for relief from the heat, Felipe Tobar — no relation to the mayor — said he saw a difficult future for the FMLN.
“The work of the FMLN has been in decline; I feel like if the FMLN does not overcome these problems, it’ll soon be snuffed out,” said the 66-year-old community leader. “I am disillusioned, not of the party, but of some leaders.”
He added that maybe the best thing would be to “organize another leftist party.”