Unity and Disunity in the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN)

It's two months before the 2012 legislative andmunicipal elections in El Salvador and campaigning has begun. We'll startlooking towards that election over the next few weeks. Unlike Guatemala,congressional elections in El Salvador are pretty important as the legislativeblocs tend to remain unified throughout the legislative period and the deputiestend to vote together. Not always, but more so than in Guatemala where, as ofTuesday, over thirty members of congress (nearly (20%) have already switched parties. 

To get us started on El Savador, here's a paper thatAlberto Martin Alvarez (Universidad de Colima) and I have forthcoming in Latin American Politics and Societyon Unity and Disunity in the Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional(FMLN):

Problems of unity can affect an armed oppositiongroup at many stages of its existence - during the war, peace negotiations, andits transition to political party. In this paper, we assess to what extentinternal divisions affected the performance of the Farabundo Martí NationalLiberation Front (FMLN) in El Salvador.

We find that while the FMLN suffered significantinternal divisions in the early years of the war, the group remained remarkablyunified from 1983 onwards. Significant divisions among the groups began to showthemselves during the later years of the war, but they did not becomeexacerbated until after the war’s conclusion when the FMLN suffered fromrepeated fracturing. The FMLN only began to present itself as aprogrammatically coherent party in 2005 and this ideological homogeneityallowed it to conclude a series of partnerships with moderate,non-revolutionary sectors of Salvadoran society and achieve victory in the 2009presidential elections. 

The paper won't be out until later this year so there might be a few formatting edits before then. However, the paper really shouldn't change much.