On January 22, El Salvador's main opposition party, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), held commemorative activities for the 75th anniversary of the 1932 Nahua-Pipil indigenous peasant revolt led by indigenous leader Jose Feliciano Ama and Agustin Farabundo Martí Rodríguez , leader of the newly formed Communist Party (PCS).
Farabundo Marti was brutally executed along with 25,000 peasants in retaliatory massacres, which came to be known as La Matanza. Feliciano was shot and left for dead by the right-wing militias, but he survived and went on to be a key revolutionary leader in El Salavador for decades.
This month El Salvador also commemorates 15 years since the signing of the UN-mediated peace accords that ended 12 years of civil war during which 75,000 Salvadorans lost their lives, 7000 "disappeared" and 1 million were forced to flee the country.
The civil war between the right-wing government, dominated by the Arena party, and the FMLN was prolonged by US intervention. Washington channelled around US$1 million per day to the Salvadoran military throughout the 1980s.
January 24 marked the first anniversary of PCS leader Shafick Handal's death. Using the nom de guerre "Comandante Simon", Handal served as commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Liberation (FAL), the armed wing of the PCS. In this capacity, he also served on the FMLN's General Command until 1991.
In the early 1990s, Handal became a negotiator for the FMLN and was a signatory to the Chapultepec Peace Accords of 1992.
Elected to the Legislative Assembly in 1997, he served as parliamentary leader of the FMLN, and was the FMLN's unsuccessful candidate for president in 2004.
The Arena government marked all these events in its usual way, with public displays of wealth and gross insensitivities — with activities even centred around the monument to Arena founder Roberto D'Aubuisson, who was also the leader of the hated right-wing death squads during the civil war.
With January marking such significant events it was entirely fitting that El Salvador and the FMLN hosted this year's Sao Paulo Forum, a gathering of Latin American leftist parties.
The San Salvador meeting of the "foro" brought together some 600 left-wing delegates from 33 different countries, the Mercopress news agency reported on January 16.
Opening the foro, Medardo Gonzalez, national coordinator of the FMLN, recalled the circumstances when the foro first started 15 years ago: the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union's collapse, Cuba's dramatic financial crisis and the Nicaraguan revolution defeated by the ballot.
"We were on the defensive and neoliberalism on full offensive. Some said it was the end of history", Nidia Diaz, another FMLN leader, remarked to Mercopress. However, today "the defeat of neoliberalism is evident and several of the forum's members are in government: Lula da Silva (Brazil); Hugo Chavez (Venezuela); Evo Morales (Bolivia). In Cuba, the revolution survived and is stronger, and regionally social movements have strengthened".
Gonzalez recalled that in 1996 the foro was against admitting Hugo Chavez as a member because of his "military coups" background, but today "he's a fundamental pillar" of the Latin American left and is developing in Venezuela "one of the most original processes in Latin America".
Gonzalez also praised the creation by Venezuela and Cuba of the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA) economic integration project, a counter-project to the US "imperial project" of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). So far ALBA's members are Cuba, Venezuela and Bolivia.