The 45th anniversary of the founding of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation (FMLN) front of El Salvador was marked at Fairfield Park on October 26, with FMLN representatives from Kaura Yerta/Adelaide and Naarm/Melbourne attending.
The message from Manuel Flores, FMLN general secretary in El Salvador, Jose Campos and other Latin Americans present, was that the struggle continues, in spite of the re-election of El Salvador’s right-wing authoritarian president Nayib Bukele.
Aland Cesar Quintana, the national coordinator of FMLN members in Australia, recounted that the FMLN was formed by five different parties of Indigenous groups, academics, peasants, workers, youth, artists, students and women in 1980 “to fight US imperialism”. It was “a bloody war” in which 75,000 people were killed.
“We are now suffering from that same imperialism, which wants to recover its position with a new intervention in Latin America,” Quintana said, adding “We will return to a democracy”.
Mauricio Funes won the 2009 presidential election for the FMLM, and Salvador Sanchez Ceren won in 2014. In 2019, 2021 and 2024, the FMLN lost both the presidential and the legislative elections to Bukele.
This happened as US President Barack Obama deported undocumented migrants back to El Salvador, some of whom formed criminal gangs. The government-led crackdown and right-wing-media campaign helped the expelled former FMLN member Bukele to be re-elected.
The Salvadoran Supreme Court of Justice ruled in 2021 that Bukele had the right to run again for the president again and the Salvadoran Legislative Assembly passed a bill in July to change the constitution to allow him to run an unlimited number of times.
It also extended the presidential term from five to six years and scrapped election run-offs.
Bukele built a maximum security prison, the Terrorist Confinement Centre, known as CECOT, in 2022, in Tecoluca, with capacity for 40,000 prisoners. In March, Bukele accepted more than 252 Venezuelans, deported by Trump.
The Venezuelan government was able to repatriate the Venezuelans, following a prisoner swap with the US for 10 convicted mercenaries captured in Venezuela.
As the FMLN remains the second largest party in El Salvador, the struggle continues and international solidarity remains important.