Feminism, Antifeminism, and Electoral Politics in Postwar Nicaragua and El Salvador
National elections marking a transition from civil war to relative normality occurred in 1990 in Nicaragua and in 1994 in El Salvador. While the long process of political transformation in Central America should not be reduced to elections, these electoral moments do capture many of the dilemmas inherent in transforming guerrilla organizations into leftist parties, and in transforming gender relations from the exceptional conditions of wartime to the relatively normal, but reformulated, conditions of peacetime. Seen from a feminist perspective, the first post-civil war election in Nicaragua was close to disastrous. Violeta Barrios de Chamorro, the presidential candidate of the fourteen party UNO (Uni6n Nacional Opositora) coalition, ran an explicitly antifeminist campaign in 1990 and won. The gendered images drawn upon by Daniel Ortega, the incumbent from the Sandinista party (Frente Sandinista de Liberaci6n Nacional or FSLN) were not explicitly antifeminist, but they could hardly be labeled feminist either. Antifeminist tactics rhetorically respond to and attack feminist organizing. This concept builds upon the work of Sonia Alvarez, who argues that gender may be politicized in two basic ways. Feminine organizing "grows out of and accepts prevailing female roles and asserts rights on the basis of those roles, [while feminist organizing] seeks to transform the roles society assigns to women, challenges existing gender power arrangements, and claims women's rights to personal autonomy and equality."1