Melendez Thesis FINAL

Toward a Theory of Conservative Party Cohesion and Schism: El Salvador’s Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) in Comparative Perspective, 1980-2009 Presented to the Department of Government in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree with honors of Bachelor of Arts Harvard College March 2015 “Un intelectual debe ocuparse de cosas que lo conmueven moralmente. Cuando escribo es porque estoy enojado o preocupado por algo, no porque pienso que debo llenar tal o cual agujero en la literatura. Escribo sobre las cosas que me preocupan cuando me afeito. Y muchas veces me corto.” - Guillermo O’Donnell1 “Si quieren ganar, pues aprendan a ser amigos.” -ARENA Founder Roberto D’Aubuisson, c. 19872 1 “An intellectual must occupy himself with the things that move him morally. When I write it is because I am angry or worried about something, not because I think that I should fill a hole in the literature. I write about the things that bother when I shave in the morning. And many times I cut myself.” Quoted in Spanish in interview by Cecilia Sosa, September 14, 2003. Translation my own. 2 “If you want to win, then learn how to be friends.” Quoted in Spanish by an ARENA Co-Founder, interview by the author, San Salvador, June 23, 2014. Translation my own. !i Table of Contents List of Figures iii Important Acronyms iv Introduction 1 1 Theoretical Perspectives on Conservative Party Cohesion and Schism 18 1.1 Theoretical Framework………………………………………… 19 1.2 Existing Explanations………………………………………….. 31 1.3 Power-Sharing Institutions: Explaining Cohesion…..………… 47 1.4 Power-Sharing Institutions: Explaining Schisms………………. 60 1.5 Environmental Factors and the Origins of Power-Sharing Institutions……………………………………………………… 68 1.6 Possible Limitations……………………………………………. 72 2 The Origins of ARENA’s Power-Sharing Institutions, 1980-1989 75 2.1 Historical Backdrop: The 1979 Coup and the Collapse of the Protection Racket Coalition…………………………..………… 76 2.2 ARENA’s Social Foundations: Oligarchs, Capitalists, and Party Entrepreneurs ……………………………….………………….. 79 2.3 ARENA’s Power-Sharing Institutions: “Learning to Be Friends”………………………………….……………………… 83 3 “Granitic Unity”: Cohesion in ARENA, 1980-2004 104 3.1 The Cristiani Presidency (1989-1994)………………………….. 105 3.2 The Calderón Sol Presidency (1994-1999)………..…………… 121 3.3 The Flores Presidency (1999-2004)…………………………….. 137 4 The “Darkest Hour”: Schism in ARENA, 2004-2009 150 4.1 The Period of Coalitional Adjustment: Antonio Saca and the New Bourgeoisie………………………………………………… 151 4.2 Initial Accommodation and the Collapse of Power-Sharing Institutions……………………………….………………………. 155 4.3 Unregulated Internal Competition and Failed Accommodation… 167 Conclusion 175 Bibliography 187 !ii List of Figures Figure 1 — ARENA’s Electoral Performance (1988-2009)…………….. 10 Figure 2 — Types of Parties of the Right……………………………….. 22 Figure 3 — Power-Sharing Institutions and Cohesion Outcomes………. 60 Figure 4 — Types of Schism……………………………………………. 67 Figure 5 — ARENA’s Power-Sharing Institutions……………………… 89 Figure 6 — The Split-Tickets Rule, 1989-2004………………………… 94 Figure 7 — Reported Members of the G-20……………………………. 99 Figure 8 — Knowledge of Institutions Among Interviewees…………… 101 !iii Important Acronyms ANEP El Salvador’s National Private Business Association (Asociación Nacional de la Empresa Privada). Founded in 1966, today the ANEP represents the interests of over 14,000 private businesses. ARENA The Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista) is El Salvador’s largest conservative party. Formally founded in 1981, ARENA controlled the presidency uninterruptedly between 1989 and 2009. COENA The National Executive Council (Consejo Ejecutivo Nacional) is ARENA’s highest-ranking executive body. Composed of fifteen officers, the COENA President is effectively the president of the party. FMLN The Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional) is El Salvador’s largest left-wing party. Founded in 1980 as an insurgent guerrilla organization, the FMLN has been in control of the presidency since 2009. FUSADES The Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development (Fundación Salvadoreña para el Desarrollo Económico y Social) is a conservative think tank founded in 1983. IVA El Salvador's value-added tax (impuesto al valor agregado). PCN The National Conciliation Party (Partido de Conciliación Nacional) was El Salvador’s largest conservative party between 1961 and 1979. PDC The Christian Democratic Party (Partido Demócrata Cristiano) was founded in 1960. It became El Salvador’s largest political party in the 1980s, but has since become electorally weak. !iv Introduction On October 12, 2009, El Salvador’s most powerful conservative party— the Nationalist Republican Alliance (Alianza Republicana Nacionalista, or ARENA)—hoped to begin anew. The previous twelve months had been the most tumultuous year in the party’s decades-long history: in March 2009, after a highly divisive presidential nomination process and an even more polarizing campaign, ARENA had lost a presidential election for the first time since 1984.1 The result had been a veritable “minefield of discouragement, sombre diagnostics, and apocalyptic rumors” that the party had been “barely able to navigate.”2 In its wake, ARENA’s oft-cited “granitic unity” had given way to months of finger- pointing and vicious internal criticisms.3 The time had come to reunite the party and move forward. On October 11, 2009, ARENA’s highest executive body—the National Executive Council (Consejo Ejecutivo Nacional, or COENA)—carefully orchestrated the party’s first General Assembly since the bitter presidential defeat: 1 Geovani Galeas and Marvin Galeas, Las claves de una derrota: Cómo y por qué ARENA perdió las elecciones (San Salvador, El Salvador: Editorial Cinco, 2009), v. Translation my own. 2 Ibid. 3 This term is regularly used by the Salvadoran media to describe ARENA’s historically high levels of cohesion. See, for example, Redacción Diario La Página, “ARENA intenta reinventarse de cara al 2014,” La Página, February 15, 2013, accessed February 22, 2015, http://www.lapagina.com.sv/nacionales/77857/2013/02/14/ARENA-intenta- reinventarse-de-cara-al-2014. !1 The incoming National Executive Council, led by former President Alfredo Cristiani [1989-1994] and ratified that same day by the assembly delegates, shook hands with the outgoing leadership, led by President Antonio Saca [2004-2009] and blamed for that traumatic electoral failure and an endless list of collateral political grievances. The call for reunification rang loud and was embraced by all of those present. It was like the touching portrait of a family reuniting after leaving behind the internecine intrigues that had fractured it and left it in a state of exhaustion.4 “I went home feeling relieved that the world had returned to normalcy,” reminisced a member of the incoming party leadership. “I slept like a baby for the first time in many, many months.”5 The touching image of reunification, however, was quickly torn apart. Early the following morning, a faction of the ARENA legislative caucus publicly declared itself “in rebellion,” threatening to abandon the party unless the new COENA complied with several political demands.6 At the conclusion of the “devastating political thunderstorm” that ensued, the dissidents—who grew quickly in both number and ambition—had abandoned ARENA and announced 4 Galeas and Galeas, Las claves de una derrota, v. Translation my own. 5 Interview with the author, San Salvador, June 3, 2014. By mutual agreement, most of the interviews and personal communications I conducted in El Salvador will be reported anonymously. 6 Sergio Arauz and Carlos Martínez, “12 diputados del partido Arena se amotinan contra la dirección,” El Faro, October 12, 2009. !2 the formation of a new conservative party, the Grand Alliance for National Unity (Gran Alianza por la Unidad Nacional, or GANA).7 Outgoing President Elías Antonio Saca—the presumptive leader of the dissidents—was quickly expelled from the party he had led for over half a decade.8 On the whole, the crisis was a seismic political shock: it created a new legislative balance that left ARENA virtually powerless and precipitated an unprecedented process of institutional and programmatic reform within the party.9 ARENA—by almost every measure the most successful conservative party to emerge from Latin America’s Third Wave10—had experienced its first schism in thirty years. A newspaper headline famously, ominously, and accurately referred to the schism as “ARENA’s darkest hour.”11 ARENA’s transition from cohesion to schism raises a series of unanswered question in political science: What explains variation in party cohesion? Why are some parties consistently more “unified” or “integrated” than others? Why do sudden (and not so sudden) schisms happen, especially among historically 7 Galeas and Galeas, Las claves de una derrota, v. Translation my own. 8 Carlos Martínez, “La hora más oscura de ARENA,” El Faro, December 6, 2009. 9 Ibid. 10 Riita-Ilona Koivumaeki, “El Salvador: Social Cleavages, Strategic Elites, and the Success of the Right,” in The Resilience of the Latin American Right, ed. Juan Pablo Luna and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), 268. 11 Carlos Martínez, “La hora más oscura de ARENA.” !3 cohesive parties such as ARENA?12 In order to understand ARENA’s 2009 schism, answering these theoretical puzzles is the central task of this thesis. In doing so,

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