Growing up in a politically polarized El Salvador, Roberto Bonilla ’18 was left with a lot of unanswered questions. At Whittier, the political science major is working on finding answers.
With the support of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship, Bonilla’s research examined how the United States may have affected political ideology in his home country, which—intentionally or not—could have affected the outcomes of Salvadoran elections for almost two decades.
“As I was digging a little deeper into the research and what had already been done about the elections there, I found something that hasn’t been connected yet to the elections,” Bonilla said.
From 1989 to 2004, the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) party won four consecutive presidential elections—a trend that Bonilla theorizes could be partly attributed to the influence of a televised educational program in the 1960s, “teleteacher,” in addition to ARENA’s control of print and televised media.
The program was developed through the Alliance for Progress, an economic cooperation program set up between the United States and Latin America. The central message, particularly in the social sciences, Bonilla said, “was to teach children the American values: individualism, capitalism, free market.”
Bonilla clarifies that he’s not making a judgment about ARENA’s political values. Rather, he’s interested in tracing the spread of those ideas in people’s minds.
The teleteacher program ended shortly before civil war erupted in El Salvador. In its wake, the ARENA party emerged in the 1980s. Thus, Bonilla hypothesizes that a good portion of the students who were exposed to teleteacher grew up to become potential voters in the ’80s and ’90s and may have affected the outcomes of those elections in ARENA’s favor.
According to political science professor Debora Norden, Bonilla has landed on a theory that could have implications beyond El Salvador. His research about the subtle ways that a larger country can influence the politics of a smaller one, even unintentionally, can be applied on a more global scale.
For instance, Bonilla is looking into whether a similar effect occurred in Paraguay, which was also part of the Alliance for Progress. “That’s where I would actually see if I’m onto something good, or something big,” he said.