With all the news about the FARC's 50th anniversary and this weekend's election in Colombia, I tried to look back at some polling concerning the Peace Accords in El Salvador in 1992. The Peace Accords were not put to a vote in El Salvador in 1992 although the strong showing by the government's representatives in negotiating with the FMLN, ARENA, in the 1991 legislative elections did bode well for the peace process.
Even though the accords were an elite pact between the FMLN and the Salvadoran government, they were quite popular in El Salvador (from what I can tell).
As you can somewhat see in the photo above, 70 percent of respondents had a positive evaluation of the peace accords in February 1992 (Jose Miguel Cruz, The Peace Accords Ten Years Later: A Citizens' Perspective). Two years later, support for the accords was still very high with 66 percent approval. According to Cruz, Salvadorans were looking for the accords to solve a number of problems, not just end the war, at this point in time. They hoped that the accords would usher in an era of prosperity (okay, maybe not that glowing) that would also lead to increased economic well-being, a strengthening of democracy, and a reduction in crime/insecurity.
When the accords did not bring the revolutionary transformation that Salvadorans had hoped, approval of the accords dropped significantly.
By January 1995, only 33 percent had a positive opinion of the peace accords. We are talking less than a year after the "elections of the century." Jose Miguel argues that over the next several years, Salvadorans reassessed what they believed the accords accomplished. As more and more Salvadorans focused on the accords' successful termination of the war, public support for the accords increased to where 80 percent had a positive opinion around the ten year anniversary of the accords in December 2001. They no longer focused on the accords' failure to bring economic and political prosperity.
I'll have a lit bit more later.
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