Schafik Handal
Schafik Jorge Hándal Hándal (pronounced [ʃa'fik 'xan.dal]; Usulután, October 13, 1930 - San Salvador, January 24, 2006) was a Salvadoran politician, son of Palestinian immigrants. He was a prominent leader of the Salvadoran left, along with Guillermo Manuel Ungo and Agustín Farabundo Martí.
Known by the pseudonym Commander Simón he was one of the five members of the General Command that led the FMLN's revolutionary war (1981-1992), he was general secretary of the Salvadoran Communist Party (PCS) (1973-1994), a party that was fully and definitively integrated into the FMLN in 1995.
He was a member of the Political Commission and the National Council of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the leftist party that would eventually become the main party of this tendency in El Salvador. Among the main positions he held in said party are those of Head of the bench of deputies in the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador (1997-2006) and member of the Political Commission of the Legislative Assembly.
Early Years
He was born in Usulután on October 14, 1930, he was the son of Giries Abdallah Hándal and Giamile Hándal de Hándal, of Arab origin from the town of Belén in the extinct Ottoman Empire, being cotton landowners from Valle Nuevo, Santa Cruz Porrillo in the department of Usulután, in the east of the country.
He began his political activity at the age of 14 in the general sit-down strike that overthrew the military dictatorship of General Maximiliano Hernández Martínez (1931-1944).
Studies and beginnings in politics: entry into the Salvadoran Communist Party
After entering the Faculty of Jurisprudence and Social Sciences at the University of El Salvador in 1949, he joined a group of young people to found the Alianza de la Juventud Demócrata Cristiana whose struggles led in 1950 to the autonomy of the University From El Salvador. Exiled to Chile in 1950, he studied Law at the University of Chile, was active in the student movement in that country and in the Chilean Communist Party. In 1957 he returned to El Salvador and being in the Faculty of Jurisprudence and Social Sciences of the University of El Salvador again, he joined the PCS and was elected general secretary of the Departmental Committee of San Salvador. He held this position until August 1960, when he was arrested and exiled to Guatemala for his activism in the formation of the National Front for Civic Orientation, as well as the April and May Revolutionary Party (PRAM), which ended when he was denied registration. legal in 1960.
Between 1961 and 1963 he was Head of the Military School of the United Front for Revolutionary Action (FUAR) and organizer of the Revolutionary Action Groups, the armed wing of the PCS. Although they did not carry out any paramilitary action, the National Guard discovered a cache of arms in Colonia Campiña in San Salvador, and was captured and imprisoned again.
The PCS had been outlawed since 1932. In 1969 its members founded the Nationalist Democratic Union party. In 1970 a crisis originated within the PCS by virtue of its Soviet orthodoxy leaning towards elections and bureaucratic political work. As a result, Salvador Cayetano Carpio resigned as Secretary General on March 21 to later found the "Farabundo Martí" Popular Liberation Forces (FPL) on April 1, advocating the armed struggle towards a Marxist socialist government.
In the Salvadoran “popular front”: the alliance with the liberal bourgeoisie (1970-1979)
In the context of the founding of the Popular Liberation Forces (FPL) and later of the People's Revolutionary Army (ERP) in 1971, and the fraud of the previous year, he was elected general secretary of the PCS in 1973. Under his leadership, the UDN (PCS) continued in the anti-revolutionary line and with the UNO, which, in the opinion of many historians, once again won the 1977 presidential elections. fraud and General Carlos Humberto Romero assumes the presidency. The UNO (with Hándal being one of the three leaders) called for an insurrection on February 28. This demonstration was repressed by the Army and more than 300 people were massacred. President Romero was overthrown in a coup on October 15, 1979. The Nationalist Democratic Union and its UNO allies were part of the first Junta de Government, an attitude that was criticized as "collaborationist" by the revolutionary organizations.
In alliance with the revolutionary forces, towards the socialist revolution
On December 10, 1979, the governmental Cuban Communist Party led by Fidel Castro, summoned the guerrilla organizations - the FPL and the FARN - and the PCS to a meeting in Havana. Hándal attends on behalf of the PCS. As a result of that meeting, on December 17 the Political-Military Revolutionary Coordinator (CR-PM) was formed.
From the electoral experiences, he finally declared that "the conquest of power by the proletariat in order to put an end to capitalism cannot be carried out by means of elections or by electoral maneuvers". In 1983, also He explained his resignation from the popular-frontist Soviet orthodox line and his integration into the armed struggle by saying that the communist parties had acted as appendages to the struggle for the democratic revolution when they should have been its promoters and leaders. "You cannot go to socialism except by way of the anti-imperialist democratic revolution, but neither can you consummate the anti-imperialist democratic revolution without going as far as socialism."
Under the leadership of Hándal, the PCS organized another armed group, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación on March 24, 1980 (the same day that the Archbishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Óscar Arnulfo Romero, was assassinated). The theater of operations of the aforementioned Armed Forces of Liberation was on different war fronts: Guazapa, north of San Vicente, Chalatenango, south of Usulután, north of San Miguel, Morazán. On May 22, he was part of the initiative in which the CR-PM accepts the ERP to become the Political-Military Unified Revolutionary Directorate (DRU-PM), an organization from which the “Farabundo Martí” Front for National Liberation (FMLN) emerged on October 10 with the FPL, the PCS and the ERP, later joined by the National Resistance (RN) and the Revolutionary Party of Central American Workers (PRTC).
Hándal and the PCS participated as a minor force in the general military offensive of the FMLN on January 10, 1981. On February 23, the United States Department of State published a special report titled “Communist Interference in El Salvador”, in which he accused the FMLN of being supplied by Nicaragua (of the Sandinista Daniel Ortega), Cuba, and the Soviet Union. Hándal and the PCS released a statement from Mexico City on February 6 in which they denied receiving weapons of the Soviet Union. In the statement, he also said that the PCS did not want any future hostile relations with the United States.
After the January offensive, the FMLN entered into an alliance with Hándal's former allies from the social democratic middle class of the FDR, which had been reorganized by Doctor Ungo with his MNR, the Movimiento Popular Social Cristiano (MPSC). of Rubén Zamora and other dissidents of the PDC, and the Movement of Professionals and Technicians of El Salvador (MIPTES) of Enrique Álvarez Córdova.
Abandonment of the socialist revolution: for a negotiated solution to the conflict
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The most influential political-military line among the guerrilla groups prior to the formation of the FMLN and the entry of Hándal and the PCS was the Prolonged Popular War (GPP) of Cayetano Carpio (Marcial), who advocated continuing the war revolutionary up to the seizure of power and the establishment of a socialist and proletarian government. The new position within the FMLN advocated abandoning the armed seizure of power and seeking a negotiated political solution to the war. This position, clearly oriented towards the middle class, was supported by Hándal, the PCS, and the other FMLN organizations, attracted by the prospects of an alliance with the FDR social democrats and a possible alliance with the PDC.
The polarization of the two tendencies was resolved in favor of dialogue and negotiation, isolating Marcial and the followers of the GPP in the FPL. The vortex of this impasse within the FMLN reached its apex on April 6, 1983 with the murder of Mélida Anaya Montes, Commander "Ana María", in Managua, Nicaragua, followed by the suicide of Marcial. But the rupture of the FMLN with the socialist revolution did not end with the liquidation of Ana María and Marcial. A group of Marcial's followers resigned from the FMLN and ignored it after calling themselves the “Clara Elizabeth Ramírez” Metropolitan Front (FCER). The FCER denounced the line of dialogue and negotiation of the FPL and the FMLN as a "blatant conciliation with the bourgeoisie (...) since it is done with the fundamental search to offer Yankee imperialism an acceptable solution, which puts an end to the war, without caring at this point in time for the leadership of the FPL the 50,000 deaths of our people and the role that the bourgeoisie has played with its repressive apparatus as those directly responsible for the exploitation, poverty and massacres of our people (...)". This episode of the FMLN ends with the publication of a communiqué on December 16, 1983 in which the General Command, with Commander Leonel González substituting Marcial for the FPL, declares: "today we are more united than ever."
Indeed, on January 31, 1984, the FMLN-FDR alliance made official its unified position in search of a negotiated solution to the conflict and published its Government of Broad Participation (GAP). Once the FMLN won over to the new line, it participated in the Dialogue and Negotiation Commission of the FMLN-FDR alliance since 1984 in La Palma, Department of Chalatenango, and in Ayagualo, Department of La Libertad, until the achievement of the New York Peace Accords of December 1991 and that of Chapultepec, Mexico City, in 1992.
Liquidation of the PCS and integration into the FMLN as a legal party
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In the post-war period, and with the FMLN already legalized as a political party, he was elected as the first General Coordinator of the FMLN during the First Ordinary Convention on September 4, 1993.
In 1994 he was a member of the National Council and the Political Commission. Likewise, he was the municipal candidate for mayor of San Salvador for the FMLN against the ARENA candidate Mario Valiente, an election that the latter won.
The FMLN declared in June 1995 to be a party of the left with tendencies, but without a defined ideology, and was appointed leader of the so-called "Corriente Revolucionaria Socialista" in opposition to the trend of the Renovators (social democrats).
In its Third Convention in December 1995, the National Council of the FMLN declared the five organizations dissolved, including the PCS. With the dissolution of the PCS, it severed forever its ties with the Marxist-Leninist ideology and the international communist movement that at this point it was in recomposition after the fall of the Soviet Bloc. The UDN is also dismantled, as well as the FMLN-FDR alliance.
In 1995 he handed over the General Coordination of the FMLN to Salvador Sánchez Cerén (Comandante Leonel González).
Upon becoming a deputy for the department of San Salvador in the Legislative Assembly in May 1997, he was appointed leader of the FMLN's legislative caucus, a position he held until the day of his death. In the National Convention of the FMLN in 2000, parallel structures that the tendencies had created were prohibited and they were virtually abolished in the FMLN, including Hándal's CRS.
Handal influenced in 2002 for the new official ideological orientation of the FMLN to be socialism, which had already been defined in the 2000 National Convention with the addition in the Charter of Principles and Objectives of objective number eight entitled " Fight to build an economic, social and political regime of a socialist nature”.
For the democratic revolution and market socialism
Since his presentations in 1983, he defined the thesis of the Democratic Revolution (DR) as the transition to Marxist proletarian socialism. In 1990, during the FMLN's transition to legality, Joaquín Villalobos presented a similar thesis - differing from Hándal's thesis due to his social democratic point of view in proposing a socialism coexisting with the market - which was published in English by the Carnegie Foundation. In 2004, he explained his conception of the DR as the struggle to "abolish dependent neoliberal capitalism and ensure national development with social justice and participatory democracy (...)" In 2002, the FMLN - under the influence of Hándal – he published his concept of socialism in twelve features among which the continuation of the market as rector of the economy but controlled by the state, the mixed economy, political pluralism, and the insertion of the country in the process stand out of globalization. Likewise, they recognize countries like Cuba, the People's Republic of China and Vietnam as countries where progress is being made in the construction of socialism "in the new world realities". This position represents a turn away from the original handalist concept of 1983.
FMLN presidential candidate
In the internal (primary) elections of July 27, 2003, he was chosen as the FMLN's presidential candidate for the 2004 elections. Previously, Hándal and Dr. Guillermo Mata Bennett, director of the Medical College, had been selected by the Political Commission and the National Council according to the FMLN statutes. He won these internal elections against Oscar Ortiz, a militant related to the Renovadores.
Hándal incorporated his political and economic regime in the DR as the ideological basis of his government program Social and Democratic Program for El Salvador that he led in his 2004 presidential candidacy. Hándal's opponent on the side of the conservative party ARENA (who had defeated the FMLN in the two previous presidential elections), was Elías Antonio Saca, also a descendant of Palestinian immigrants and with family ties to Hándal. In his government program, he emphasized that all the changes he sought were framed in the Constitution and in international law, and that its foreign policy "will cultivate friendly relations with the United States (...)".
Even so, he was harshly criticized during the electoral campaign through systematic smears and personal attacks conducted by members of the Republican Party in the United States Congress and by people directly connected to the George W. Bush Administration. The president Francisco Flores, pointed out in the United States that Salvadorans residing in that country could be deported if the FMLN won due to Hándal's indisposition in the face of family remittances provided by Salvadorans residing in that country. Four days before the elections, the Congressman Thomas Tancredo threatened to control these remittances. The campaign was denounced by various sources, including a group of US congressmen led by Raúl M. Grijalva, who sent a letter to Secretary of State Colin Powell in which they protested the interference of States United in the Salvadoran electoral process.
During his electoral campaign, he formed a broad popular base with the Bloque Popular Social and the Alianza Democrática por el Cambio. He also signed an alliance with the Movimiento Social Demócrata led by former commander Jonás, Jorge Meléndez, leader of the former ERP that left the FMLN together with Villalobos and another with the Patria para Todos Movement (MPT), a movement made up of former leaders and militants of the RN led by Roberto Cañas. It also attracted middle-class figures as a group headed by Marina Estela Ávalos, the ex-wife of the former mayor of San Salvador for the FMLN and dissident Héctor Silva, and a group of Army soldiers led by retired Colonel David Munguía Payés, former leader of the Popular Action party.
In his campaign as a presidential candidate, he clearly outlined the dimension of what he called the anti-neoliberal program. In addition to the aforementioned alliances with sectors of the middle class, Hándal signed what he called a "parliamentary alliance" with the right-wing PCN party, a minor ally of ARENA. This controversial alliance was criticized even by circles linked to the Central American University &# 34;Jose Simeon Cañas" (UCA). But the surprises of Hándal's anti-neoliberal program went even further when he met with the association of Korean maquiladoras and told them: "You are welcome, count on my support, since El Salvador needs foreign investment." Later, the newspaper Frente reported on a meeting between Hándal and Enrique V. Iglesias, the director of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in which Iglesias shook hands with Hándal promising international credits to a possible FMLN government.
On May 24, after analyzing the elections, he published a document in which he declared "illegal and illegitimate" the presidency of Elías Antonio Saca. Despite this situation, however, Hándal published an article in which he stated that "changing the system using its same rules is difficult, but not impossible (...) There are those who argue that it is not it is possible to generate a process of change from within the system, acting with the same rules of the system. I disagree with this opinion, which is presented as the absolute and indisputable truth."
At the end of 2004, the State Department revoked Hándal's visa to enter the United States.
He died unexpectedly on January 24, 2006 in the Salvadoran capital due to a sudden heart attack, shortly after his return from the trip he made to Bolivia, at the inauguration of the elected president of that country, Evo Morales, another significant representative of the Latin American left.
In the Legislative Assembly, he was replaced as leader of the bench by Salvador Sánchez Cerén (Comandante Leonel González). In the 2006 elections, he was a candidate for deputy in the Central American Parliament. The FMLN created what during the 2006 electoral campaign was called the "Schafik Effect" after the massive attendance of around 100,000 people was reported at Hándal's funeral. Said "effect" was created by the traditional Catholic celebration of the 40 days, period in which the FMLN carried out events of a political nature to maintain the situation created by the death of Hándal and influence the results of the elections of March 12, 2006.
Legacy
His children, Jorge Schafik, Herlinda and Anabella (by his first wife Blanca, whom he married in 1949 and died in 1980); and Xenia (Tania's daughter); his wife, of Russian origin, Tania.
Conferences and political forums
The conferences and political forums he attended are very significant: the one in April 1983 where Hándal participated in the International Scientific Conference held in Berlin, in what was then East Germany, on the occasion of the Centenary of the death of Karl Marx; the World Solidarity Conference in Havana, November 1994; the World Parliamentary Action Conference held at the Capitol in 2003; the First Latin American and Caribbean Meeting of Parliamentarians in 2004; the International Conference against Terrorism, for Truth and Justice, in Havana in June 2005. The Forum on the Future of El Salvador sponsored by the World Affairs Council of Northern California on July 8, 2003.
Acknowledgments
On January 16, 2004, he was invested with the title of Honorary Professor of Political Science at the Autonomous University of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, in a ceremony held at the University of El Salvador.
Posthumously, he was declared a "Deserving Son of the City of San Salvador" by the mayor of San Salvador Carlos Rivas Zamora, and PARLACEN deputies granted an "Honor of Central American Merit" recognition. The Permanent Party Commission Políticos de América Latina (COPPPAL) posthumously induced him with the order "Luis Donaldo Colosio". In this sense, it is also worth mentioning that on January 27, 2006, the University General Assembly of the University of El Salvador agreed to propose to the Superior Council University student of that same house of studies that was awarded the "Doctorate Honoris Causa Post Mortem" to Schafik Hándal, who approved said recommendation on April 6, 2006. The posthumous award ceremony of this honorary title, along with a medal of honor, took place on September 19, 2006 at the Cine Teatro of that educational center, being received by Jorge Schafik Handal Vega, son of Schafik Hándal, at the hands of Dr. María Isabel Rodríguez, who at that time was acting as rector of that institution of higher education.
The Auxiliary Catholic Bishop of San Salvador, Monsignor Gregorio Rosa Chávez, said that Hándal was the country's greatest politician in the 20th and early 21st centuries. Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez was one of the Latin American leaders who were most saddened by the death of Hándal, who considered him a great revolutionary.
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