Wednesday, November 30, 2011

U.S. Provides E.S. with Naval Support to Fight Drug Trafficking

      At the beginning of this week the United States made a donation to El Salvador's naval forces of seven patrol boats. A representative of the U.S. government explains that this donation was made in order to strengthen the Salvadoran security by matching the capabilities of most naval forces in the region. At the Naval Force installations Defense Minister Jose Atilio Benitez states: "This donation valued at more than five million dollars represents a significant step in the cooperation we have to strengthen the security of El Salvador" (El Mundo). This donation is part of the cooperation between the United States and El Salvador  that falls under the Central American Regional Security Initiative (Carsi) and the Southern Command of Enduring Friendship. Previously under Carsi, the United States ambassador has given an Aponte bomb disposal team to the Salvadoran National Civil Police, and x-ray equipment to the Salvadoran prison system.
      Of the seven vessels, two are "patrol boats attack Justify class Boston Whaler 37-foot length, a Boston Whaler patrol boat type attack guardian of 22 feet in length and four patrol Safe Boat attack, defend class of 44 feet in length." In addition to these seven patrol boats, the soldiers in charge will receive proper training from U.S. personnel to ensure the vessels are used properly. These new boats will increase the navy's speed on water and allow for better performances.
       Although the main purpose of these patrol boats is to help decrease drug trafficking through El Salvador, the boats and their updated technology can also benefit the country in national emergencies like the E-12 storm when rescue teams needed speed and communications to be able to perform rescues and deliver supplies.

Monday, November 28, 2011

Nature vs. El Salvador

First of all, I hope everyone was able to have a Happy Thanksgiving, enjoying good food and family!

          It has been reported by EL Mundo that Mother Nature has struck El Salvador again, this time leaving less of a wake. This past weekend El Salvador was hit by multiple seismic tremors. They began between 4 pm on Friday evening and continued up until 7 am on Sunday. According to the National Service of Territorial Studies, a total of 1,039 micro earthquakes occurred between Friday and Sunday but the population was only aware of about 28 of them because the largest only reached 2.5 on the Richter scale.
         The areas that were affected by these tremors were the municipalities of La Union and El Carmen, and the village of Tihuilotal. 125 homes were reported damaged. Tihuilotal acquired the most damage, which consisted mainly of displaced roofs that were made from tiles. The Civil Protection is visiting these areas to asses the damage and to ensure that no greater damages have occurred. They are also distributing tents to families effected by the tremors in an effort to prevent personal injuries.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

Thanksgiving Rally in Solidarity with the Movement of the Global 99%


Capitalist globalization has forced governments all over the world to prioritize the economic interests of the richest 1% of the global population over basic needs such as education, health care and employment for the other 99% of humanity.   Faced with a corrupt democratic process, staggering social inequality and an ecological crisis which threatens life itself, the 99% has risen up against this injustice in over 1,500 cities all over the world, through the Occupy Movement in the United States and the Indignados Movement in Spain and other European countries, and through a wealth of local and national alternatives in Latin America and around the world.
  
This informal network of global resistance is constituted by autonomous movements that strive to be open, horizontal and democratic- an organizational model for a new global system based on human dignity and the rights of Mother Earth, not profits.  

On this Thanksgiving Day we join this global resistance movement as national and international residents of El Salvador, gathered in front of the U.S. Embassy to protest the U.S. government’s subservience to the interests of the global 1% which negatively affects people all over the world.

We specifically demand an end to the following transnational policies in Central America:
  • The Free Trade Model that destroys local economies, victimizes workers and the poor, and protects corporate interests over national sovereignty. For example, in El Salvador, Pacific Rim, a Canadian mining company, is using a World Bank tribunal to sue the the Salvadoran government for protecting their own environment and communities.
  • Regional Militarization Strategies that criminalize social protest, subject national security systems to  intervention and supervision by the U.S. government and facilitate violent repression of activities that jeopardize the interests of global capital, exemplified by the collusion between U.S. and Honduran political-military forces in the 2009 ousting of President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. Since the coup in Honduras, farmers, women, youth, the LGBTQ community and activists have been the victims of increasing state repression and human rights violations.  
  • Environmental Destruction and Climate Change that has largely been caused by greenhouse gas emissions of the U.S. and other highly industrialized countries.  Central America recently suffered Tropical Depression 12 `E, whose devastating intensity is widely considered to have been a result of climate change.  In El Salvador, this storm caused 34 deaths, the evacuation of 50,000 people from their homes and losses in infrastructure and agriculture estimated at 850 million dollars.  Meanwhile the U.S. continues to increase its emissions and block meaningful national and international action on global warming.       
We stand together today, citizens of the Americas and beyond, united with the global Occupy movement to promote alternatives to this inherently flawed system like economies of solidarity, fair trade, food sovereignty, fair tax systems, participatory democracy: a global system that puts people and the environment before profits. We are here to liberate our governments and our planet from corporate occupation and to take them back for the people.
Spokespeople (Interviews in Spanish or English)
Alexandra Early-7486-0162 earlyave@gmail.com
Alfredo Carias- 7836-3289  alfredo_carias@gmail.com
Danny Burridge-7393-7294  dannyb2012@gmail.com

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

COFAMIDE Coordinates with the PDDH and Others to Form a Database for Missing Migrants

      The Committee of Relatives of Missing Migrants (COFAMIDE) is a Salvadoran based organization that was founded in 2006 as an initiative of mothers, fathers, husbands and wives and children seeking to find out what happened to their family members that set out on the trek to the United States. COFAMIDE began as a grassroots organization that received no help from the government and thus, resorted to informal channels to track down their loved ones, dead or alive. Realizing that they were not the only ones dealing with the pain of not knowing, they set out in 2009 on a "Walk of Hope" from San Salvador to Ixtepec, Mexico following the route that the majority of migrants take, to gather as much information as possible from locals and to meet with local governments in effort to form a database of collected information on missing migrants.
     While on this March many belonging to COFAMIDE held hope they would find their relatives. In fact, the group became aware of several mass graves of Salvadorans murdered in Tamaulipas, but unfortunately there was no willingness on the government's part to uncover these graves for analysis. And sadly, more mass graves are still being discovered.
      After a change in the Salvadoran government in 2009 and the slaughter of Tamaulipas, efforts to protect the human rights of migrants in transit have grown, but are yet to be affective. 
      On a more positive note, Diario Co Latino reports that COFAMIDE has been in contact with the Ombudsman for the Defence of Human Rights, the Deputy Minister for Salvadorans Abroad and the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team (EAAF) to build a DNA database that will be able to identify those who disappear on their way to the United States. This project was initiated in August of 2010 and is aimed to help those migrant families that report a missing or assumed dead family member. The group currently has 143 cases lined up for this new database and 160 samples of DNA provided to help locate and identify missing migrants. The EAAF has extended its search to Northeastern Mexico and Texas to compare DNA with local Morgues. This DNA database will allow for a more reliable verification of remains and allow for family members to recover and bury the remains according to their beliefs.
     This database may seem to be too simple of a concept to be worth celebrating to some, but to COFAMIDE and those who have spent years wondering what became of their loved ones this is a huge step. Now, instead of having to rely solely on hearsay to locate and identify migrants, technology and scientific data will be available to speed up and ease the search. Unfortunately, this database isn't a Fix all. The COFAMIDE will still have to battle the government (both Salvadoran and Mexican) and persuade them to take action to protect migrants from harm and to release information on the location of mass graves. In addition to this, COFAMIDE will still be reliant on the informal channels of hearsay to find out the details behind what happened to their loved ones.

     As Thanksgiving approaches we account for all of the things we are thankful for, jobs, family, friends, freedom etc. For many, Thanksgiving is a time to be spent with family for those lucky enough to have family to spend it with. And although Thanksgiving is an American holiday, let's remember our Salvadoran friends, especially the ones who have missing family and friends that have not been accounted for.

Monday, November 21, 2011

SOA Watch's Vigil Leads to Only One Arrest

         According to the Ledger-Enquirer the number of people arrested for civil disobedience at the Vigil this weekend was a shocking low of only one. In the past this number has reached as high as 85 for trespassing and other acts of disobedience. However, the number has been in decline with only four arrests last year and one this year. The reason for this is speculated to be a result of all of the occupy protests that are currently taking place across the nation. The total number of participants was estimated to be around 5,000. According to Hendrik Voss, the movement's national organizer "The numbers is not the main thing...
You get 70,000 people out for a football game and that doesn’t do anything. Overall it was a great atmosphere and a good event."













            The person arrested was a woman from Denver, Colorado, Theresa M. Cusimano. Theresa is an activist that previously served time for crossing over onto the base three years ago, and is currently facing up to 6 months of prison after posting $1,000 bond.
            In addition to this, actor Martin Sheen was among the 5,000 attendants and deliverd an impassioned address quoting Robert F. Kennedy and reciting a Rabindranath Tagore poem.

To read more on this weekends events visit:
http://www.ledger-enquirer.com/2011/11/21/1828170/soa-watch-smaller-protest-leads.html
http://www.soaw.org/

To view more photos from this weekend visit:
http://www.soaw.org/component/content/article/3823
http://www.soaw.org/news/news-alerts/3820-high-resolution-photos-from-the-satirday-rally

Friday, November 18, 2011

Third Annual Vigil to Close the School of the Americas, Ft. Benning , GA


        The SOA Watch began in 1990 in Ft. Benning, GA as a small grassroots organization aimed at shutting down the School of the Americas after the Nov 16, 1989 murder of the 6 Jesuit priests other horrific massacres in Latin America. The SOA Watch has grown into a large and diverse organization over the years, still fighting for the rights and lives of those in Central America that have been and continue to be affected by millitaries that are trained by the School of the Americas (U.S. military school located in Ft. Benning, GA.)
         The School of the Americas was established in 1946 during the Cold War as The Latin American Training Center in the Panama Canal Zone at the U.S. army base Ft. Amador. It quickly expanded, and in 1949 it was moved to Fort Gulick and renamed U.S. Army Caribbean Training Center. The expansion didn't end there. In 1963 it was renamed the School of the Americas and was once again relocated to its current location of Fort Benning, GA in 1984. The SOA taught American military courses in Spanish to military officers of the Western Hemisphere. Its claimed mission was to foster a mutual relationship of transparency and cooperation with these nations. In actuality, as many citizens of these nations came to find out, its mission was to be the big brother to hostile and corrupt militaries, providing funding and training in exchange for "cooperation" otherwise known as control over the region. During the mid 90's the SOA came under heavy criticism by the Center for International Policy for encouraging and influencing human rights violations in multiple Latin American countries. As a result of this criticism and heavy international pressure, and in attempt to disassociate itself from its horrible past, the School of the Americas was "shut down" (renamed) and the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHISC) was opened in January of 2001.
        
   At this years Vigil there will be multiple workshops and rallies focused on the United States current immigration laws (especially the one recently passed in Alabama) and foreign policy in Latin America. The Vigil began this morning at 10am and will continue through Sunday.

 If you are interested in attending any of the events check out the SOA Watch's website for more information on schedule and location details.
Even if you can't make it to Georgia this weekend you can still make an impact by learning more about the SOA , writing to the President to shut down the SOA and taking action in your area.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Salvadoran Secondary Schooling in a State of Decline

             The Ministry of Education (MOE/ MINED) has reported that the Salvadoran education system is struggling. MINED reports that the national average of the Middle School Learning and Aptitude Test (PAES) is the lowest it has been since the test was implemented in 1997. The highest average was 6.4 in 1998, but it has steadily declined in recent years to 5.43 in 2009, 5.14 in 2010 and to a staggering low of 4.85 this year. Experts believe this significant decline is due to "the incomplete development of the curriculum because of the breaks between the school year due to strikes magisterial and 10-day suspension of classes by the rains of Tropical Depression 12-E" (La Prensa Grafica). In addition to this, experts believe that gang violence has begun to have a significant impact on the decline in scores as well. As of yesterday, MINED reported that 126 students have been killed 119 of which were secondary (middle school) students. This number is drastically higher than last year when MINED reported a total of 52 students killed, and there are still two months left in the year!
              The Minster of Education has acknowledged these disturbing statistics and has declared that it is "Our duty is to make an assessment and appropriate corrections that will improve. We will discuss with teachers what are the basic contents for the capabilities and competencies that young people should at the end of its average level." In addition to this, he has also mentioned the need to increase the amount of 'alternatives to violence programs' available to youth throughout El Salvador.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

As the 22nd Anniversary Approaches Salvadorans Commemorate the 6 Jesuits and 2 Women

As the 22nd anniversary of the assassination of the 6 Jesuits and 2 women approaches, we should take time to join in solidarity with our Salvadoran friends who have already begun commemorating the lives of these martyrs. A mass and vigil was held Saturday night to remember and honor the lives of these individuals and also to encourage others to live their lives in imitation of Jesus as the martyrs did.
The following is a translated article from DiarioCoLatino that discusses the impact of their assassination and how it is still important today, 22 years later.

"Our martyrs, killed for acting like Jesus " :Rector Oliva
Ivan EscobarDiario Co Latino Writing
 
The courage to denounce, at a time when El Salvador was at one of its darkest times, and have a critical vision, especially attached to defending the rights of the majority, were some of the reasons why the "power" decided end the lives of two women and six Jesuit priests, the night of November 16, 1989.
22 years have passed since that tragic event occurred, a slaughter committed by a group of soldiers, who received the Order of Staff, held amid the shadows of the night, and a society convulsed, the vilest murder .
At that time, the guerrillas drove the General Offensive "all the way" and in a desperate measure, the military, through terror,  wanted to stop the momentum of the guerrillas. At first, they blamed the FMLN murderers, and even formed a committee to report it internationally.But also, after 22 years of collective murder, justice has started to turn in favor of the victims. And in Spain, a judge kept open a trial against a group of soldiers who ordered the slaughter, with the consent of former President Alfredo Cristiani. In the past month, the judge who took the case, has requested the Government of Spain to ask El Salvador for their extradition  in order to judge them in that European nation.
Archbishop José Luis Escobar Alas, Archbishop of San Salvador, said Sunday that "as a church we are the victim in the slaughter of the Jesuits, they were our priests and as many who have lost loved ones in this war, and even worse, because they were slaughtered ... we are seeking justice and truth. "He urged those who "committed the murder, we ask you ... do not seek to obstruct justice, this process in Spain, we leave in the hands of justice."
On Saturday night, in the Central American University "Jose Simeon Cañas" (UCA), the religious communities in different parts of the country and from different nations remembered their martyrs: the six Jesuit priests, Ignacio Ellacuria, then rector of the UCA, Ignacio Martin-Baro, vice rector academic, Segundo Montes, Director of the Institute of Human Rights of the UCA, Juan Ramon Moreno, Director of the Library of Theology, Amando Lopez, Professor of Philosophy, Joaquin Lopez y Lopez, founder University, and the collaborators Elba and Celina Ramos.
The cold night did not stop hundreds of people who came to be participants in the commemoration, which began with the traditional procession of lanterns, continued with Mass and ended with the vigil.
The priest Andreu Oliva, rector of the UCA, urged people to "imitate the Salvadoran martyrs" before, during and after armed conflict, to continue dying for the sole reason "to imitate Jesus."
In his message, called the inner peace, combat the root of the problems faced by Salvadorans, like crime, poverty, unemployment and the collapse of the prison system, among others,
"The Martyrs of El Salvador were taken seriously for committing these words ... as Jesus, defend the poor, denouncing sin ... for all this cost them their lives, for the love of neighbor," stressed the religious, in a crowd people, mostly young people who gathered at the traditional day that ended at dawn on Sunday.
Archbishop Escobar Alas, recalled yesterday that "they had a vision of peace."
"True servants of Christ"The priest Sariego Jesus, the Jesuit Provincial for Central America, arrived Sunday to the Crypt of the Cathedral, to officiate at the Mass in honor of anniversaries religious assassinated in 1989.
At Mass, the priest said that the murdered Jesuits "were true servants of Christ, who never deserved to die." He added that as Monsignor Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the UCA martyrs "believed in this town. They loved this town ... under this poverty was a treasure that was worth it to leave (his) talent, "he said.

Friday, November 11, 2011

No Sugar Coating to it, Funes Addresses the State of Affairs in E.S

            According to an interview by DiarioCoLatino with Gerson Martinez, Minister of Public Works, as of November 5th progress in El Salvador is being made to address
the impact of contingency, rehabilitation, rehabilitation reconstruction, but we have to turn around, we have to make a turning, change, change the old concepts of reconstruction, which has been an eternal return and that has flooded cities, where the river banks slums and there is an eternal return. That's what we have to change to a change of direction and move towards a new concept for reconstruction. A reconstruction articulated to the adaptability of social and productive infrastructure, climate change. A reconstruction concept also articulated the logic of development, but sustainable development, friendly nature in harmony with the environment, that is the way that it moves now El Salvador.”
Martinez also makes a point that it is important for Salvadorans to reconsider how they live as a country, not just how the roads and bridges are built. In the past many people in the rural lands of E.S. have redirected rivers and built levees in order to make farming more feasible. Even though this has been beneficial to the mercantile wealth of the people and country, recent storms are proving it to be more problematic than beneficial. In fact, when asked if the levees and riverwalls should be rebuilt Martinez responded:
“Nature can not be mastered. The riverbeds you can change, but the rivers have memory and return to their own causes. You can violate the dictates of nature, but nature has the final word... This is not about rebuilding today, only to restore, to replace what was destroyed, we can not keep doing more of the same and the same way, we have to replace what was destroyed, but under new technical standards, increase the bridge heights, increase water flow, new construction standards for housing.”
We are making progress in addressing the impact of contingency, rehabilitation, rehabilitation reconstruction, but we have to turn around, we have to make a turning, change, change the old concepts of reconstruction, which has been an eternal return and that has flooded cities, where the river banks slums and there is an eternal return. That's what we have to change to a change of direction and move towards a new concept for reconstruction. A reconstruction articulated to the adaptability of social and productive infrastructure, climate change. A reconstruction concept also articulated the logic of development, but sustainable development, friendly nature in harmony with the environment, that is the way that it moves now El Salvador”

This need for innovation was also stressed by President Funes on Tuesday when a temporary bridge was opened in La Libertad. He stated that the government’s purpose is to reengineer the entire country “A restructuring is based on responsible management of environmental risk.” Unfortunately, the price of innovation and reconstruction is well above what El Salvador can manage on their own. Even after recently receiving a grant and a donation of 7,000,500 hygiene kits and clothing from the Inter-American Development Bank to supplement previously received loans and grants, the cost of reconstruction and repair is still too much for El Salvador to bear on its own. President Funes admits to this and announced that his intentions are not to beg but: “We have to appeal for international aid to rebuild the country... but we need a fiscal pact where those who have more, give more to bring sufficient resources to the state coffers.” Funes concludes by stating: “I was going to say we all have to put in a bit, but it was for 20 years and nothing helped. Better say, we all have to turn our will, our spirit of solidarity, putting our hearts, our minds and our hands in the heart of the people to get ahead, and God help us”.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

In the New Gangland of El Salvador

The following is an article  that was taken from the New York Review of Books,written by Alma Guillermoprieto, a Salvadoran that has been away from E.S. for 30 years:

In the New Gangland of El Salvador
I’m back in El Salvador for the first time in thirty years, and I don’t recognize a thing. There are smooth highways from the airport up to San Salvador, the capital, and even at this late hour, along the stretch of dunes dividing the road from the Pacific Ocean, there are cheerful stands at which customers have parked to buy coconuts and típico foods. But I remember a pitted two-lane road, a merciless sun that picked out every detail on the taut skin of corpses, a hole in the sandy ground, the glaring news that four women from the United States, three of them nuns, had just been unearthed from that shallow pit.
“Is there a monument or a sign marking where the four Americanas were killed during the war?” I ask the driver of the hotel van.
“Yes, up in the university, the UCA, where they died.”
“No, those were the six Jesuit priests, years later, in San Salvador. I mean the nuns, in 1980, here.”
“Oh,” he replies. “I don’t remember.”
That event, the rape and murder of four religious workers on their way from the airport up to the city, was no doubt memorable to people like Robert White, the US ambassador in El Salvador during the last year of the Carter administration. He stood grimly at the funeral the next day, looking like another potential target of a putschist right-wing junta that had gone rogue. Already that year, Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the fearless archbishop of San Salvador, had been assassinated—to loud rejoicing by a ruling class that used to call him “Beezelbub.” Weeks after his murder, orchestrated in the darkest back channels of the regime by the notorious ideologue Roberto D’Aubuisson, the Reagan administration cranked up its military involvement in El Salvador, and dedicated billions of dollars to the junta’s fight against an insurgent coalition of guerrillas—Marxist radicals grouped under the umbrella name of Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional (FMLN).
The twelve-year-long war would leave as many as 70,000 people dead by its end, but it started before more than half of all Salvadorans alive today were even born, and ended nearly twenty years ago. Why should a young van driver remember? And yet, the El Salvador of today, riddled by worse violence than at any point since the early years of the war, linked inseparably to the United States by an immigrant stream that started during the conflict, haunted always by the memory of the assassin Roberto D’Aubuisson, who went on to found the party that ruled his country uninterruptedly until the most recent election in 2009, is inconceivable without the years of bloodshed.
Salvadorans like to say that if someone bothered to iron their country it would actually be large. But it is tiny, and wrinkled, the lava of long-exhausted volcanoes furrowing and bending the landscape this way and that. San Salvador sits in a valley at the foot of a volcano, and guessing wildly one could say that it now has as many shopping malls as, say, Fort Lauderdale, and plazas and traffic roundabouts too, and tranquil neighborhoods with security guards on every block. It is very green, and even the slums creeping up the hills on the outskirts of the city seem lush to those used to more urban kinds of poverty.
On the very flank of the San Salvador volcano sits the town of Mejicanos, famous for its combativeness during the war. A long narrow street climbs up from it and then winds down and around the sides of a narrow canyon. Following it as it plunges along, one can see that the leafy shadows are dotted thickly with makeshift houses and shacks. Here and there, a knot of skinny men huddle around what looks like a crack pipe, but otherwise the street is silent and empty.
The neighborhood and the road are both called Montreal, and they are notorious. Last year a Montreal public transport bus making the trip to the center of Mejicanos was set on fire as it reached the Mejicanos market. Seventeen people burned to death. The toll included an eighteen-month-old child, but at least a few of the dead are said to have been members of one of the warring maras, ferocious gangs that are El Salvador’s own contribution to the drug trade and the world of transnational crime in which it takes place. Children of the war and the United States in more ways than one, they are responsible for most of the harrowing violence of today. They first began to attract public notice some twenty years ago, when what used to be a furious open conflict gave way to an ever- growing, pervasive sense of menace.
Around that time, Marisa D’Aubuisson de Martínez, sister of Roberto D’Aubuisson, decided to create a project for market women and their youngest children in a neighborhood like Mejicanos. Marisa’s forceful personality and easy laugh are in contrast to the will-o’-the-wisp, mesmerizing quality of her brother, as are her politics: she is a lifelong Catholic activist, a follower of the fearless archbishop her brother murdered. Roberto, who was to die of throat cancer in 1992, moved into electoral politics in the 1980s. As the war wrapped up, Marisa, too, changed, moving away from world-changing utopian dreams in order to focus on more attainable projects. I talked to her one day in the sunny, plain office where she works.
“At that time international aid went largely to macroprojects, but I started to write up something very small,” Marisa said. With international money, she founded an organization called Centros Infantiles de Desarrollo (CINDE) to provide day care for babies and toddlers, primarily for the children of women who make their living selling in the marketplace. Now there are three such centers, including one in Mejicanos, to which preschool and kindergarten facilities were eventually added.1 A few years ago CINDE created a program known as “school reinforcement,” in which older children can do their homework in safe surroundings and with adult guidance. One of them is in Montreal, and it is one of the few places in that neighborhood where outsiders can feel welcome and safe from the maras.
The after-school center is just an open-air hangar attached to two makeshift rooms that are rarely used, because they get oven-hot. On the breezy afternoon when I arrived the children were outside, enjoying an uproarious play break, but when the teacher in charge blew a whistle they returned at once to the open-air work tables and applied themselves to their homework almost voraciously. Everyone there, from the teachers to the volunteer monitors, seemed nearly feverish in their involvement. I interrupted the schoolwork of the older girls—who had ambitious English names like Jennifer and Natalie—to ask one if she came here to learn or to have fun, and she replied instantly and seriously, “I learn and I have fun.” Her grades had improved, up from Cs and Ds the previous year to a steady B average, but she was struggling, she said, with her least favorite subject, math.
Perhaps the general enthusiasm was due to the last-chance quality of the center itself. During a play break I watched a beautiful young girl kick a soccer ball around with her playmates as if she were still a child, but she was tall for her age and already nubile, and I felt almost sick with fear for her, having heard over and over that mareros—gang members—routinely force young girls in their territory into sexual service, a duty that often begins with collective rape.2 Or, on visita íntima day, which throughout Latin America is nominally the day when wives are allowed privacy with their jailed husbands or established partners, older girls may be sent as “wives” to the prisons where gang members are serving sentences. No one knows exactly how often the visita íntima may take place in Salvadoran prisons. As one friend pointed out, anyone who is admitted to some of the more notorious jails has access to the visita íntima rooms. Parents desperate to keep their daughters away from any sort of contact with the maras send them to the countryside to be raised by relatives, but not everyone has rural cousins or parents, and the barrio of Montreal and its dangers were this girl’s unavoidable circumstance.
As it is for the boys. “We have a boy who comes here all the time who is incredibly bright, really special,” one of the teachers told me in a low voice. “But he’s just a step away from joining the maras. He’s so little! Just a muchachito. We’ve talked to him about it, we try not to gloss over reality here, but he’s ready to go. We won’t be able to keep him away.”
I discovered some of the more immediate rewards available to boys who join the maras in the Mejicanos market, downhill again from Montreal. There, the market women, who have no problem at all with math, explained their lives to me in numbers: they pay the municipality thirty-five cents daily rent per each 1.5 linear meters their stands occupy.3 They spend fifty cents in bus fare to get to and from home, multiplied by the number of school-age children. Four dollars worth of produce purchased wholesale plus three dollars to ferry the merchandise back to their stands. The day’s earnings minus four dollars for the next day’s purchases, minus bus fares and taxis, leaves three, on a good day four, dollars to buy food for the family.
Then there is la renta, the daily extortion fee charged by mareros, but no one would do that math for me. Whether the renta around the market is charged by members of the Mara Salvatrucha—also known as the MS-13—gang or by the increasingly powerful rival group, the Barrio 18, was also left unclear. Several minors who belonged to the Barrio 18 were tried and sentenced for setting fire to the bus, but still no one I met, not even the teachers at the CINDE preschool center, was willing to talk about the incident.
I was chatting one afternoon with a particularly lively woman—let’s call her María—who started to tell me how CINDE and the microloan program it manages had changed her life, because she now had a cart in which to trundle her wares back and forth, when two boys who looked to be around fifteen years old arrived at her stand. She cut the conversation short as the kids selected some of her wares and left without any money changing hands. Maria’s eyes flickered with terror when I asked her if she was being renteada, or extorted, by the mareros. “Not really, not really,” she whispered, looking at me pleadingly. “They don’t ask me for money. Not yet. Just…little gifts.”
“We don’t rentear,” José Cruz declaimed loudly, as if for the world. “That is an invention of the press.” He has a great speaking voice, Chinese eyes above high cheekbones, none of the mareros‘ trademark face tattoos, a lithe body, and a fantastically authoritative manner. “How are you doing?” he boomed as he walked into the prison visitors’ room, extending a wrist-cuffed hand, and never stopped lecturing from that point on. After our conversation a prison guard came up and, while one of his mates looked on, whispered that as a leader of the Barrio 18 gang Cruz was the de facto head of the penitentiary. It was Cruz, the guard said, who decided who gives press interviews (he did); which prison guards are allowed into the cell area where forty-five to fifty prisoners are confined every night in cells six by six meters large; and who gets punished.
Mauro Arias/El Faro
Suspects awaiting trial in a National Civil Police jail, Lourdes, El Salvador, 2011
He was very focused: at age twenty-nine he had already served seven years of his homicide sentence and had fifteen left to go, and he wanted to get out on time and alive. “I am a rehabilitable prisoner,” he informed me. He keeps his temper. At night, I heard, he retired early (I assumed he had larger headquarters than most) and slept soundly. After our conversation I was told that under the do-rag, or bandana, that imprisoned gang members wear he did, in fact, have tattoos—two eyes on the back of his head that allow him, he was not the only one to believe, to see his enemies at all times. He had been interviewed, he boasted, by French, Dutch, German, American journalists, you name it, and now he was trying to catch me with his rhetoric—we are victims of society, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—but nothing he had to say was arresting as his physical presence, or the information whispered by the guard, but widely known outside the prison, that beatings and executions by knifing or beating were a fact of life in the penitentiary of Quezaltepeque.
Unlike the market women in Mejicanos, the guard had no particular reason not to talk: everyone knows that the prison system is bankrupt, and that it is impossible to control a detention system in which prisoners—nearly half of them accused or convicted killers—are stuffed into cells like industrial livestock. In El Salvador there are sixty-five homicides per 100,000 inhabitants, which is more than triple the current rate in Mexico, and significantly higher than the yearly death toll in the second half of the war. In a total prison population of 25,000, a third have never been sentenced. Overcrowding is so extreme that the prison system this year refused to take in more inmates. New detainees are being kept in police holding pens, but given the crime rate and the number of arrests the pens quickly become just as crowded.4
There have been riots and also peaceful strikes by prisoners demanding better conditions, but the men are not high on anyone’s list of priorities. It’s just one of the many catastrophes in El Salvador, where, twenty years after the war that was supposed to save the country—from capitalism or from communism, depending on which side you were on—there are half a million single parents, mostly women, trying to bring up their children safely. The government is bankrupt, the poverty rate is 38 percent, and the economy, which rose slightly from a negative growth rate of–2 percent in 2008 thanks only to an increase in the price of coffee, seems paralyzed.
It would be easy to lay the blame for this social and economic disaster exclusively at the feet of the party founded by Roberto D’Aubuisson—the Nationalist Republican Alliance, or ARENA, by its Spanish initials—which governed the country with evident if not single-minded interest in the well-being of the wealthy for twenty years after the peace accords were signed in 1992. (In 2009, Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the party founded by the former guerrillas, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front, or FMLN, won the presidency.) But there is also the enormous fact of the war itself: the demolished roads and other infrastructure, the collapse of rural society, the rise of urban slums peopled by campesinos fleeing those remote areas of the country that were the war’s principal staging ground, the systematic practice of ruthlessness, the drastic increase in single-parent families, the loss of an educated elite, the huge stockpile of leftover weapons no one kept track of. None of this, however, adds up to a complete or satisfactory explanation for the proliferation of the maras, currently estimated to number some 25,000 members at large, with another 9,000 in prison.
The phenomenon started in Los Angeles, where the children of immigrants who had fled the war had parents no one looked up to and were bombarded with ads for consumer goods they couldn’t have. They grew up in bad neighborhoods and inherited someone else’s enemies and turf wars. Among the second-generation Salvadorans in Los Angeles a significant number ended up creating their own groups to confront the Mexican and Afro-American gangs in whose neighborhoods their parents had settled. Of the two groups currently taking over just about every poor neighborhood in El Salvador, the Barrio 18 gang take their name from the 18th Street gang in Los Angeles, whose members number in the thousands. As for the Mara Salvatrucha, who started it all, the only part of their name everyone agrees on is that “Salva” must stand for Salvadoran.
As US immigration policy has focused on deporting the greatest possible number of undocumented migrants, no matter what their situation, a great many Salvadoran deportees, some of whom grew up in the United States and hardly speak Spanish, have found themselves back in their country of birth. A number of these unwilling returnees are mareros, who either join the local branch of their organization or try to flee back home (that is, to the United States), joining a migrant trail across Mexico used by hundreds of thousands of would-be US immigrants every year. Along the way, the mareros are often recruited by Mexican drug traffickers, who have developed highly lucrative sidelines in white slavery, child prostitution, and migrant extortion. Assault, robbery, and rape are now an expected part of the migrant journey through Mexico.
The most unlucky travelers are kidnapped in Mexico and held for ransom, usually between five hundred and two thousand dollars. If relatives back home cannot come up with the money quickly enough, the kidnap victims are killed. According to Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights, 11,000 migrants were kidnapped in the first six months of 2010. There are no statistics on the total number of dead, but we know that in August last year seventy-two migrants were kidnapped and killed in a single incident. Six months later another 195 bodies were unearthed in the same municipal district. Mareros were probably among the assassins.
Howard Cotto, subdirector of investigations for the National Civil Police, has been learning about the maras for years. He is the trim, articulate product of the peace accords signed between the ARENA wartime government and the FMLN guerrillas, which included a UN-mandated restructuring of the various murderous police corps into a single force that integrated and trained members of both parties to the war. Another police commander, Jaime Granados, laughingly described the resulting National Civilian Police to me as the homely child no one wants, largely due to its efforts at neutrality. “We’re good police, very good,” he said. “But nobody is on our side.” The police are underfinanced and underequipped (there is one forensic expert for the whole country) and corruption is spreading, but they have managed to retain pockets of efficiency and professionalism, and the international diplomas and certificates that line the wall of Howard Cotto’s office—one is from the FBI—are signs of the commander’s prestige.
Cotto estimates that the gang’s support community in the barrios numbers perhaps eighty or ninety thousand, which together with the number of active and imprisoned mareros add up to about 1.5 percent of El Salvador’s population. Although the maras are on the retail end of the illegal drug trade in El Salvador, he does not attribute their growth to the drug-trafficking bonanza in Central America, now that the region has become the principal corridor for moving South American drugs to North America. “The gangs are clearly a part of organized crime, as are the traffickers of drugs and arms and stolen cars and so forth,” Cotto told me one morning in his sparsely furnished office. “But traffickers build hierarchical organizations around specific interests—white slavery, smuggling, drugs—and the traders lure people in on the basis of that [business]. The gangs do the opposite: they recruit from the bottom up.”
The gangs distribute drugs in the barrio while casting themselves as its defenders, Cotto said.
But in reality, they don’t defend the barrio; they terrorize it. The barrio is the territory where they extort, distribute drugs, kill, and make money. But they don’t live with a lot of luxury; they’re not narcos. Their origins are in the community, and what they fear more than death itself is losing their authority there, because the moment they do that, they’re dead. But it’s an excellent way of living comfortably and giving money to a lot of people; their strength lies in not breaking that chain of money distribution. That’s how they can say [to their underlings], “fight for me.”
Cotto chatted easily under a wintry blast of air conditioning. “[A marero’s] life is very short,” he continued.
They get sentenced to thirty years in no time. But in this country, as they see it, they have two choices: you can be a loser and keep on studying, and let’s see if you can find a job once you’ve graduated, or you can be a powerful man by the time you’re fourteen or seventeen. You can give orders, be in charge of distributing drugs in the neighborhood. You won’t have to give your elders any respect, you’ll be the one who can say to a neighbor, “You’re going to leave this barrio this minute,” and then take over his house. You’ll be able to say to that girl you like and who doesn’t like you, “You know what, whether you like it or not you’re going to be mine, or whoever else’s I decide.”
Cotto has seen a lot of corpses by now: beheaded, dismembered, set on fire. (It is said that the first thing a new marero must do, no matter how young, is arbitrarily kill someone. After that, they’re ready for reprogramming.) But the most upsetting murder scene he ever arrived at was in a mara stronghold, in one of the collective homes the kids call casa destroyer. “I was nonplussed,” he says. “We walked into the house and all the kids were there, in a circle. And there was the dead person. He’d been dead a few hours already, but they hadn’t [disposed of him]. They were just sitting around the corpse, chatting and taking it easy.”
Alexis Ramírez, who joined the maras when he was fifteen, doesn’t look like he could kill people thoughtlessly, although he is serving fifty years for homicide and has forty-eight left to go. He has dark skin, full lips that look sculpted, big black eyes, and looks much younger than his twenty-nine years. I asked him if, when he was free, it hadn’t been dangerous for him to walk down the street covered in tattoos, and he gave a sideways smile. “If you know how to walk it’s not. From corner to corner…that’s how I’ve been all over El Salvador.” And he made a ducking, aw-shucks movement that made me see how he could, in fact, slip and smile his way around many obstacles.
He came, he said, from a nice family; his father, an evangelical, “was always involved in matters of the church,” while his mother “for approximately fifteen years has been persevering in the things of God.” His brothers work in a carpentry shop. His father-in-law recently managed to smuggle Alexis’s wife out of the country, presumably in order to get her away from Alexis’s influence, and the couple lost custody of their two children—now aged five and nine—who are in the care of their grandparents.
He was still in school when he decided to join the maras. “I saw the tattoos [of the mareros in his neighborhood]. I saw the way they behaved toward each other,” he said. “In my neighborhood they didn’t steal from people; they took care of them. I liked all that.”
He had, I pointed out, a fairly dismal life. Didn’t he regret the decision to join?
“When we took the option of being what we are,” he answered, “we knew there was no turning back.” I tried, unsuccessfully, to figure out if that ducking, swaying thing he did was an authentic remnant of what had once been a whole and gentle person, or an ingratiating trick that a thoughtless killer kept stored among his array of weapons.
José Eduardo Villalta, twenty-four, has the word “eighteen,” as in Barrio 18, tattooed in French and English on his arms and fingers, and in Latin numerals and various other codes wherever else a tattoo can fit. He has no charm, but in the course of our conversation it came out that he was originally from the countryside, and that his mother visits him regularly. I asked him to describe how one sets up a milpa, or corn field, and as he was going through the procedures—cutting down, burning, overturning, hoeing, planting—I had a momentary vision of a youth breathing free air. He has most of a fifty-year sentence still ahead of him, and I asked him if he didn’t find that depressing.
“No,” he said firmly. “I feel at ease here. This is my home.”
October 12, 2011
Research support for this article was provided by The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute.
1.      1
The day care centers were canceled this year for lack of funds, leaving only the kindergarten and preschool programs. 
2.      2
A chilling account of one such rape was published in July by the remarkable Salvadoran online daily El Faro : see Roberto Valencia, "Yo Violada," available at www.salanegra.elfaro.net/es/201107/cronicas/4922/. 
3.      3
El Salvador's official currency is the US dollar. 
4.      4
Not long after my visit, the head of the penitentiary system dismissed and replaced all the Quezaltepeque prison's custodians. 

Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Will the Mining Ban in E.S. Become Permanent? Or is it Merely a Bargaining Chip for Election Purposes?

            Five months ago, on June 28, 2011, President Funes decided to fulfill his campaign promise and legally ban the mining of metals in El Salvador. In her report, Emily Atchenberg quotes Funes’ reasoning behind this ban: “Despite the potential relief that mining revenues could offer his cash-strapped government, Funes said, ‘I will not put the public health of the population at risk in exchange for some additional income that we might receive’” (Atchenberg 1).
            Although this ban is a major step for El Salvador, it isn’t enough for many of its citizens, especially those belonging to The National Round Table Against Mining (known as the Mesa). Mesa members are not content with this ban because it will only last as long as Funes is in office and can thus, change at the will of each future president. To keep this from happening, Mesa members are pushing for the government to pass a bill and make this ban permanent.
            Unfortunately for the government, passing a bill to permanently ban metal mining is easier said than done. The current ban has brought on several law suits against the country from mining companies such as the Pacific Rim, which is a Canada-based transnational mining company that received a permit to start a massive exploratory for gold mines in 2002. The location of this mine is in the basin of the country’s largest river, the Lempa, which is one of few uncontaminated water sources left in the country. The Mesa and other anti-mining supporters argue that this mining project is more problematic than it is beneficial. Their reasons include:
  1. “The water-intensive cyanide ore process used by mining companies like Pacific Rim will undermine rural farming and fishing economies, and deplete drinking-water supplies—the average metallic mine uses 24,000 gallons of water per hour, or about what a typical Salvadoran family consumes in 20 years” (1).
  2. “Toxic runoff, leaks, or spills could cause widespread contamination, and Cabañas is prone to earthquakes and torrential rains, further heightening public health and safety concerns. Such problems would add to the many environmental challenges already facing El Salvador, which is arguably the second-most environmentally degraded country in the Americas (after Haiti)” (2).
  3. Mesa says few local residents have the technical skills to qualify for a permanent position. Under existing law, only 3% of mining profits would be paid to the Salvadoran government for potential reinvestment in social and economic programs” (2).
  4. “The projected operational life of Pacific Rim’s Cabañas mine is just six years” (2).
  5. “Mining has also caused social conflict and violence in communities… Pacific Rim targets funds for scholarships, schools, and other benefits to municipalities (and mayors) not directly impacted by mining, creating friction with those communities that are affected. In this context of mounting tension, four anti-mining activists in Cabañas have been killed since 2009 in what the Mesa describes as targeted assassinations. Dozens more, including environmental leaders, priests, and community radio journalists, have received death threats, which the company blames on “internal feuds”—that is, the very conflicts that its presence has created”(2).
The nation is fighting lawsuits, because in 2007 the majority of its citizens decided mining should be banned and thus prevented the Pacific Rim from completing technical steps that were required to continue and in 2008 the company was unable to proceed with exploratory operations. Because of this, the Pacific Rim decided to sue the Salvadoran government for $77 million claiming that the government violated their investor’s rights under DR-CAFTA by failing to approve an extradition permit. This case is currently pending in a World Bank court. Meanwhile, the Salvadoran government is spending over $800,000 defending itself against charges by other companies. Funes has been consulting with a Spanish firm since 2010 to discuss the pros and cons of the ban in order to become better prepared for potential legal exposure that accompanies the 26 existing active exploration permits and the 73 pending applications. Rosa Chávez, the Environmental Minister, explains that it is because of these potential lawsuits, that the government must consider alternatives to the ban because: “We are the government now...We have to play by the formal rules” (3).
However, in regards to upcoming elections and promises made, Chávez quickly follows stating that governments and public officials should never be trusted. The Mesa, on the other hand, believes that if Funes decides to stick with a ban, then the rest of the legislature will receive pressure from the public and be forced to support it due to upcoming elections.
With Salvadoran legislative elections in May of 2012 the campaigning period has begun. The question remains, however, will the government listen to its people and ban the mining of metals permanently? Or will they merely promise a permanent ban for the purpose of elections and fail to follow through once elected? OR, will the government be forced to retract the ban (elections or not) due to the financial strain created by the lawsuits, which will only contribute the nation’s already bleak state of financial affairs that have worsened as result of the E-12 storm damages?