The CRISPAZ Blog

The 12th National Meeting of Private Enterprises

2012-02-13T12:32:00.000-08:00

The National Association of Private Enterprises (ANEP) met with government officials today at the 12^th annual National Meeting of Private Enterprises. ANEP presented to the presidents of the three branches of government a series of proposals that will improve the human and economic development of the country.

At this National Meeting of Private Enterprises (ENADE) the focus will be on the current deficiencies found in El Salvador’s democracy. Jorge Daboub, the president of ANEP, states that there are serious deficiencies in the electoral system and various institutions, and if they are not addressed and corrected will hinder the development of

El Salvador

The document presented at this years ENADE is entitled “

El Salvador

does have a future commitment to democracy” and includes seven proposals of electoral and institutional reform that is geared to improve human and economic development.

Those that were expected to be in attendance included Julio Maria Sanguinetti, former president of Uruguay, President Mauricio Funez, Sigfrido Reyes, the president of the Legislative Assembly, the president of the Supreme Court, Jaime Bellarmine, and other government officials and members of the private sector and related organizations.

La Prensa Grafica reports on four of the seven reforms. The first reform “proposes to maintain the goal of deputies to be chosen through open lists, ie that citizens choose candidates of their choice, even if they belong to different parties. Currently you can only vote for candidates of the same party.”

Another reform proposes that proportional representation of parties be established in local councils and that their term is limited to five year, which will require amendments to the Electoral and Municipal Codes.

The third reform proposal is “to adopt a law on transparency in financing political parties and candidates supporters transparent revenue and expenditure of political parties to finance their activities, including election campaigns, and "maintain medium-term goal that the country has a law on financing political parties and nonpartisan candidates, and as long-term goal of a political party law.”

A fourth reform that La Prensa Grafica includes in their article is in regards to the creation of an entity like that of the United States Electoral College. This separate entity will “administer the functions and processes of electoral events and electoral justice teaching: creating an Electoral Institute which is the highest authority in electoral matters, administration and verification of the electoral process.”

These proposals are admirable, however we must now wait to see if they are approved and if so, how they will be implemented.

Funes Acknowledges Government Involvement in the El Mozote Massacre and Seeks Forgiveness

2012-01-17T09:46:00.000-08:00

Yesterday marked the 20^th anniversary of the signing of the peace accords that ended the civil war in El Salvador. In order to celebrate this historic event President Funes, along with members of his cabinet, the Chairmen of the Legislature and the Supreme Court Justice gathered in El Mozote to acknowledge the massacre that occurred thirty years ago and to ask the people for forgiveness on behalf of the government. Funes stated: "I am convinced that the best way to celebrate the 20th. Anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords is moving forward in recognizing the truth and uphold justice," (El Faro).

The El Mozote Massacre was an organized attack by the Salvadoran army that occurred between December 10^th and 12^th of 1981(Diario CoLatino). And although it only lasted two days, over one thousand civilians were killed- half of which were children. President Funes announced that the Atlacatl Battalion, an elite division of the Armed Forces that was trained by the United States and led by Lieutenant Colonel Domingo Monterrosa, Major José Armando Azmitia Melara second in command, and the chief operating officer then-Mayor Natividad de Jesus Caceres Cabrera were responsible for this operation and the slaughtering that occurred (El Mundo).
By acknowledging this massacre, Funes has become the first president and government official to admit that government’s repressive forces were responsible for committing this violation. In fact, even the national media had taken steps to hide the truth and the fact that it had even happened at all.

Funes states that "This apology is not intended to erase the pain," but that “I'm here in El Mozote to recognize the truth and deepen the way of righteousness and peace… This is an act of recognition and dignity of the victims”(Diario CoLatino).

Funes met with International Commission of Human Rights to officially seek forgiveness for the slaughter on behalf of the Salvadoran government and has agreed to accept responsibility for the crime and to seek moral reparations to the victims.

Also, as Commander of the Armed Forces, Funes ordered a review of the historical interpretation of what happened in El Mozote, requiring that the texts and symbols accurately reflect what really occurred. In addition to this, Funes ordered that military leaders responsible for this slaughter and other serious human rights violations no longer be exalted or called heroes.

According to the President, the need to end impunity and the obligation to seek justice is imperative, because without doing so El Salvador can never be considered a full democracy.

"If we understand that democracy is a political system that must ensure equity, justice, peaceful coexistence, equality of opportunity, a prevailing system in real freedom, the independence of the branches of government, the social responsibility of the State, the absolute guarantee of human rights, well then, we are still far from real democracy in our country " (El Faro).

Police Forces in Public Schools? Plans to Reduce Violence in Schools

2012-01-12T12:32:00.000-08:00

    As the issue of youth violence and gangs continues to escalate in El Salvador officials are forced to focus their attention on preventative measures.
   El Salvador's National Education Council consulted the public on ways to counter youth violence. The public's response? Public School Police Force. The idea is that a special police force would be created a part from the National Police as the public was not able to define what role the PSPF would have outside of schools. This PSPF would attend special training on human rights and would "work according to the reality of the school and not stigmatize young people" (El Mundo). Unfortunately, the results of a consensus show that the likeliness of a policy being created in favor of this recommendation is obsolete.
   Another recommendation presented to counter the violence, is to not change what happens in schools, but to change what happens outside of schools to replicate school public safety. And in addition to this, it is suggested that agreements be made with private companies to provide work to the youth through internships and part-time jobs.
   The Ministry of Education has responded saying it will continue its efforts to reduce violence in schools. But for now, it will continue to be through the monitoring and control of teachers and principals.

One Week into 2012 and Deportation Numbers are Already Climbing

2012-01-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

     It hadn't even been a full week into 2012 when El Mundo reported that the numbers of Salvadorans begin deported from the United States is escalating.
    Last Thursday a flight arrived in San Salvador with 114 illegal immigrants on board being returned to the Salvadoran immigration authorities. According to authorities this is the third flight of the week. The previous two had 80 and 60 reported illegal immigrants. Authorities report that the total number of deportees returned to El Salvador in 2011 was 25,845. With 260 deported in less than the first week of the year, 2012's numbers are projected to rival and possibly surpass last years.
     The immigration report also states that of these 260, 97 are reported criminals, having committed a crime of drug trafficking, illegal possession of firearms, domestic violence, sexual assault, and or belonging to a gang in the United States. Welcoming these criminals back into their country, where the same acts could possibly be committed, concerns the Salvadoran authorities that are already battling staggering homicide rates and gang involvement.
    In order to help address this area of concern, the Salvadoran government provides a 'Welcome Home' shelter in San Salvador where their returning citizens (both with and without the criminal record) can receive counseling, food and medical care. In addition to this, the government also provides money for bus fare so that they may return to the city or village that they came from. The expectation of the Salvadoran government is that by providing these services the illegal immigrants will return "home" and not become a repeat offender. This unfortunately, as anyone can see, is wishful thinking by only putting a band-aid on a deeply infected wound. Assisting in the return process does not change the essential reasons behind why so many Salvadorans left El Salvador illegally in the first place. And the majority of these reasons are put on the back burner as the government attempts to tackle one issue at a time starting with the high crime and homicide rate.
    In fact, the previous Director of Immigration requested that the United States slow down on the deportation. And that the U.S. provide a criminal record in advance to the deportation, especially of those who have committed serious crimes so that the Salvadoran authorities can track and monitor them more effectively, rather than letting them roam free in E.S. -free to commit the same crimes.
    With only one week into 2012, the issue of immigration and deportation does not look to bright for Salvadorans. There are, thankfully, almost a full 12 months to create change and turn this unfavorable situation around.

The Final Part of the Mozote Massacre Documentary

2012-01-04T08:44:00.000-08:00

Capítulo 8. Las despedidas

Pedro Chicas está sentado en una banca y se siente humillado. Durante 20 años ha liderado en la fase judicial las peticiones de justicia para las víctimas de la masacre, y le enoja presentir que se acerca la hora para que él claudique. A Pedro Chicas se le está acabando el tiempo.

Pedro Chicas está sentado en una banca de su casa, dispuesto a dar su testimonio, pero no lo puede dar. Un cáncer en la garganta le ha ido cortando el habla poco a poco, y ahora apenas y puede pronunciar monosílabos.

Los viejos ya están viejos, y no faltará mucho para que guarden silencio y dejen de contar sus historias para siempre. Rufina Amaya falleció hace cuatro años, el 20 de mayo de 2007, sin ver justicia.

Los viejos ya están viejos, y delgados. Juan Bautista, Sotero Guevara, Antonio Pereira y Pedro Chicas han perdido los músculos, y ahora son piel que se pega cada vez más a sus huesos.

Pedro Chicas se frota las manos, ladea la cara, carraspea, mientras una muchacha lee un papel y dice que su nombre es Pedro Chicas, y que lo que tiene que contar es que el 10 de diciembre… Pero la muchacha no es Pedro Chicas, porque Pedro Chicas está a su lado, escuchando aquello que tanto quiere decir, las veces que sean necesarias. Pero no puede.

Somos salvajes, porque queremos que Pedro Chicas hable, que su voz quede grabada en el vídeo, en el audio, y le disparamos una pregunta.

Entonces Pedro Chicas, con el poco aire que le permite pasar su garganta, devuelve cuatro enfáticos gemidos:

“¡Que se haga justicia!”

Liliana Pérez, de 21 años, nuera de Pedro Chicas, se dispone a leer el testimonio de este sobreviviente, quien ha perdido la voz.

***

En la casa de Orlando Márquez ya nadie está viendo el televisor. Se acabaron las carreras y la nieta de Orlando, Idalia, corretea por el patio, mientras Míriam bromea con sus invitados, porque a sus invitados se los están comiendo los jejenes.

Orlando Márquez aún no se va hacia la milpa, en donde ha dejado embalada la corta de la temporada, porque espera que le terminen de preparar la comida del siguiente día. Dice que tiene que ir a acampar porque últimamente en la zona se han estado robando las siembras.

Juan Bautista asiente, y le dice que dentro de poco él también tendrá que hacer lo mismo con su milpa, que todos los días llega a cuidar en unos terrenos que tiene cerca de El Mozote. Se lamenta también por lo caro del transporte, y rememora aquellos años, los de antes de las masacres, con un “antes no era así esto”.

En eso, Míriam Núñez se para en la puerta del cuarto y llama a Juan Bautista porque quiere enseñarle una foto. Es una fotografía viejísima, de más de 30 años. En el retrato se ve cómo eran Agustina, Edith y Yesenia antes de convertirse en los huesos que hoy están en el saco. Detrás de Míriam, los huesos de sus suegros y de sus pequeños cuñados ya están descansando de nuevo en una silla de plástico.

—El único que hace falta es don Santos y José. De ellos no tenemos fotos –dice Míriam.

En la imagen aparece una Agustina alta, blanca y de semblante serio. Su hija Edith es pequeña, pero no tanto como Yesenia. Y Yesenia me mira directo a los ojos mientras descansa para siempre en los brazos de su madre.

Míriam Núñez, esposa de Orlando Márquez, muestra un retrato de su suegra Agustina y su cuñadas Edith y Yesenia, fallecidas en la masacre del caserío El Mozote.?

*Nota de la redacción: El lunes 28 de noviembre de 2011, el Juzgado Segundo de Primera Instancia de San Francisco Gotera ordenó la exhumación de los restos sin rescatar bajo los cimientos de la casa de Orlando Márquez. Los forenses del Instituto de Medicina Legal no solo encontraron más restos de los padres y hermanos de Orlando, sino también los huesos de otras siete personas.

Part 7 of the Mozote Massacre Documentary

2012-01-04T08:41:00.000-08:00

Capítulo 7. Los verdugos que nunca existieron

Domingo Monterrosa, a la derecha, junto al teniente coronel Sigifredo Ochoa Pérez. Santa Clara, San Vicente, 1983. Foto pública tomada del muro de ASVEM en Facebook

Por la calle negra que atraviesa el departamento de Morazán, patrullan hoy unos soldados que en la solapa cargan, bordado, el nombre del comandante que dirigió todas las masacres de El Mozote.

En nada tienen que ver esos soldados de hoy, con los soldados de hace 30 años. Pero mucho tienen que ver con la ironía, la burla, la demostración de poder del ahora.

“Tercera Brigada de Infantería, teniente coronel Domingo Monterrosa Barrios”, se llama el regimiento que domina toda la zona oriental del país. Ese es el nombre que llevan bordado en la solapa los soldados.

Los verdugos que no existieron siempre fueron –y han sido-“héroes” para un ejército y un país que le temen verse frente al espejo de la historia.

El primero en llamarlos así fue el ministro de Defensa de aquellos días, José Guillermo García. La Prensa Gráfica reportó el 17 de diciembre de 1981, cuatro días después de finalizadas las masacres, que José Guillermo García calificaba como “verdaderos héroes” a los soldados que arriesgaban su vida en las montañas de Morazán, para librar al país de la guerrilla.

Tres años más tarde, el 23 de octubre de 1984, Domingo Monterrosa murió luego de un atentado explosivo de la guerrilla, ocurrido en el municipio de Joateca, en las montañas de Morazán. La guerrilla activó una bomba en el helicóptero en que viajaba el comandante, junto a otros oficiales, periodistas de la Fuerza Armada y unos sacerdotes castrenses.

Un día después, la Asamblea Legislativa declaró duelo nacional. Tres días de duelo nacional: uno, dos, tres…

***

¿Sí existieron? ¿Sí existen? Los oficiales denunciados por la Comisión de la Verdad y por Tutela Legal del Arzobispado sí existen, sí existieron. La gran mayoría eran oficiales graduados con honores, expertos en guerra, entrenados en la Escuela de las Américas.

Lo que no existe, o quieren hacer creer que no existe, es un registro de las actividades realizadas por cada uno de ellos en las fechas de las masacres. Ni de ellos ni de las tropas de San Miguel, San Francisco Gotera, más los comandos del Batallón Atlacatl que lideraron las masacres.

A los militares que han dirigido a la Fuerza Armada de El Salvador, durante los últimos 30 años, sus jefes, civiles, siempre les han creído que esos archivos no existen.

Por ejemplo, el 21 de julio de 1992, el juez Federico Portillo pidió a la Presidencia de El Salvador que informara de los operativos realizados por el ejército, en los días de las masacres, en el departamento de Morazán.

En respuesta, Óscar Santamaría, entonces ministro de la presidencia del gobierno de Alfredo Cristiani, contestó:

“Al revisar el libro de registro de operaciones militares que lleva el Ministerio de Defensa, no se encontró orden militar alguna para realizar operativos militares durante el mes de diciembre de 1981 en la zona de Meanguera, departamento de Morazán, ni antecedentes de ninguna clase que se relacionen con la supuesta operación militar”.

Esa respuesta se incluyó como ejemplo, por parte del Estado salvadoreño ante la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, para rechazar los alegatos de los demandantes, quienes aseguran que no se las ha hecho justicia. El Estado salvadoreño asegura que sí, que el caso ya fue juzgado.

***

Pintada que apareció en el caserío El Mozote después de perpetrada la masacre del 11 de diciembre de 1981.

El 1 de septiembre de 1994, el juez Federico Portillo aplicó al caso de las masacres de El Mozote la ley de amnistía de 1993. Lo cerró. ¿Pero a quién aplicó la amnistía, si los militares que perpetraron las masacres nunca existieron, porque según la Fuerza Armada los archivos de esos operativos no existen? ¿A quién hizo responsables, si no había -no hay aún- forma de comprobar que los denunciados estuvieron ahí?

Aunque el operativo sí existió, los verdugos no existieron, porque alguien quiere que así sea.

Pero los denunciados sí existieron. Siguen ahí, con una vida normal. El Faro encontró a uno el pasado octubre, y aunque no quiere hablar, no niega nada acerca de las masacres.

En sus informes, Tutela Legal del Arzobispado incluyó el nombre del subteniente Luis Ángel Pérez Reyes, como comandante de una sección del Batallón Atlacatl al momento de la masacre.

Pérez Reyes llegó a coronel en su carrera militar, y ahora trabaja como gerente de la alcaldía de Santa Rosa de Lima, en La Unión. Se molestó el coronel cuando El Faro, vía telefónica, le preguntó por la masacre en la que participó.

“No estoy interesado en hablar”, dijo el coronel. “Eso pasó hace mucho tiempo ya”, se escudó el coronel. “¡No tengo tiempo!”, gritó el coronel. “Tal vez en otro momento la llega a leer usted (mi versión) en algún libro”, terminó el coronel, antes de colgar el teléfono.

El caso de las masacres de El Mozote ya no está en la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, sino en la máxima instancia de justicia continental: la Corte Interamericana de Derechos Humanos. Eso porque el gobierno civil siempre le ha creído a sus militares, porque ni la Fiscalía ni el juez fueron a secuestrar los archivos militares de la época, en lugar de pedirlos prestados. A menos que algo diferente ocurra, las masacres de El Mozote seguirán en la impunidad. A menos que ocurra algo más que pedir perdón a las víctimas por parte del Estado.

***

Chapter 6 of the Mozote Massacre Documentary

2012-01-04T08:38:00.000-08:00

Capítulo 6. Los reencuentros

A los dueños de esos huesos, en vida, Juan Bautista los visitaba para comprarles cuajadas y azúcar, hace más de 30 años.

La mujer sigue sacando huesos. Tantos que da pena. Ya no caben en la silla, pero ella los sigue sacando. “A mis hijos les daba miedo al principio”, dice. Uno de sus invitados, que desde hace varios minutos se ha quedado hipnotizado, reacciona cuando escucha la palabra miedo. “No, no hay que tenerles miedo”, corrige.
Míriam Núñez, entonces, le cuenta una infidencia.
—Mire: a mí no me dieron miedo, pero me impresionó al principio encontrar tanto hueserío. Pasé enferma como cuatro meses, con fiebres y calenturas. Pregúntele a mi esposo. Él se puso malo también.
—¡Es que no es así no más! -dice Juan Bautista, reflexivo.
—¡Yo me impacté tanto! Ni creía. Mi esposo me había contado, había leído el libro, pero como uno lee libros de historias… Y ahora ya no es cuento porque ahora es la propia realidad.
Míriam sigue sacando huesos. Juan Bautista se desahoga:
—Y aún así la gente no cree… Es tan dura la gente, usted…
Míriam saca un zapato de niña, tierroso, y se le queda viendo.
—¡Imagínese! ¿Cuántos años tiene todo esto y no se ha destruido por completo? 30 años parece, ¿vedá?
Míriam, entonces, decide que tiene que contarnos cómo fue la masacre en El Mozote.
—Estos huesos están aquí porque a la mayoría los quemaron ahí en lo que es ahora la plaza. Ahí hicieron fila: a las que eran mujeres aparte, y hombres aparte. Ahí en esa iglesia encerraron a unos ancianos y ancianas. A esos los mataron adentro. Y todos los que estaban haciendo fila afuera los mataron afuera. Y de ahí los recogieron todos juntos y les dieron fuego. Y aparte de eso a los niños los habían metido en la casa de…. ¿cómo se llama este señor? …
Míriam busca apoyo en Juan Bautista, pero Juan Bautista no interviene porque Míriam recuerda el nombre del hombre que hace 30 años esparció un rumor, que viajó por las montañas de Morazán, para que a El Mozote llegaran cientos de campesinos a refugiarse. Entre estos Juan Bautista.
—¿Comó se llama este señor …? ¡Marcos Díaz! Yo no soy de aquí, pero he leído el libro, le estoy diciendo lo que he leído y no me estoy inventado nada. Ahí habían encerrado a los niños. Y la señora que quedó de sobreviviente, que se llamaba Rufina Amaya, ella escuchaba los gritos de los niños. ¡Mamá, nos están quemando! ¡Mamá, nos quieren matar! Entonces en esa casa de Marcos Díaz encerraron solo niños. Y a los adultos los mataron en el parque, en el llano… Eso es todo lo que le puedo decir.
Juan Bautista guarda silencio, satisfecho. Míriam Núñez ha hecho un buen extracto del relato que él ya había escuchado, completo, 21 años atrás, cuando se reencontró con Rufina Amaya.

***

Es el 30 de octubre de 1990. En los pasillos de los tribunales de San Francisco Gotera, cabecera del departamento de Morazán, dos campesinos están sentados y están nerviosos. Ambos saben que todo puede acabar aquí, adentro de una casa con paredes blancas. Pero también todo puede comenzar. Y esa pequeña posibilidad los anima a estar ahí, y es más fuerte que el miedo que les provoca estar ahí. La guerra todavía no ha terminado y el ejército sigue teniendo demasiado poder.

Los campesinos estaban animados también porque ya uno de ellos, antes que ellos, sí se atrevió a poner la denuncia, a sabiendas de que el viaje podía ser peligroso. Todo eso lo habían deliberado ellos, junto a sus abogados, cuando se reencontraron, nueve años después de haber huido de esas tierras arrasadas, en los reasentamientos del norte de Morazán, ubicados a las orillas de una calle que hoy siguen llamando calle negra.

Tras las masacres, los civiles que huyeron de la guerra y la gran mayoría de los sobrevivientes terminaron refugiados en unos campamentos ubicados en Colomoncagua, Honduras, hasta que en 1989, gracias a la presión internacional, retornaron a Morazán, que para los últimos años de la guerra, fue una zona controlada por la guerrilla.

Antes de poner la denuncia, los campesinos se reunieron junto a sus abogados en la clandestinidad. Las últimas reuniones ocurrieron en una casa de unas monjas católicas, en la cabecera del departamento. Ahí acordaron todos que había que interpretar roles. Uno pondría la denuncia y otros dos serían los testigos. Uno de estos contaría el resultado de varias masacres, la otra, la testigo principal, diría cómo había sobrevivido y cómo es que había visto, casi de manera completa, la masacre en el caserío El Mozote.

Entonces Pedro Chicas, un hombre blanco, alto y determinado, otrora líder de un cantón llamado La Joya, llegó a decir a ese juzgado: “Mi nombre es Pedro Chicas y vengo a poner una denuncia…”.

Cuatro días después fue el turno para Juan Bautista Márquez y Rufina Amaya.

El relato de Rufina se robó los silencios del juez y de la auxiliar del juez. Se robó también algunas lágrimas de Juan Bautista, quien ya lo había escuchado antes, pero que entonces sintió como que aquella fuera la primera vez.

Rufina Amaya en la puerta del juzgado de San Francisco Gotera, Morazán, tras la presentación de la denuncia judicial contra los mandos del Batallón Atlacatal. Octubre de 1990.

***

Para 1990, las masacres de El Mozote seguían siendo ocultadas por los gobiernos de El Salvador y Estados Unidos.

La primera denuncia ocurrió el 27 de enero de 1982, cuando muy lejos de El Salvador, The New York Times y The Washington Post dijeron -de manera simultánea- que en el departamento de Morazán, cientos de campesinos habían sido masacrados por el ejército salvadoreño, según denunciaba un grupo de sobrevivientes, entre ellos, Rufina Amaya, la única sobreviviente del caserío El Mozote.

El primer funcionario salvadoreño en negar la masacre fue el entonces embajador de El Salvador en Estados Unidos, Ernesto Rivas Gallont. “Rechazo enfáticamente la afirmación de que el ejército salvadoreño haya matado mujeres y niños. Este tipo de actuación no está de acuerdo con la filosofía de las instituciones armadas”.

En Estados Unidos, luego de las publicaciones, a los dos autores de las notas los acusaron de inventar las historias con el interés de favorecer a la guerrilla salvadoreña. En ciernes estaba la aprobación del Congreso estadounidense para incrementar la ayuda militar a El Salvador.

Aunque al público el gobierno de Estados Unidos negaba las masacres, en enero de 1981 varios cables diplomáticos entre San Salvador y Washington ya planteaban lo contrario. Esos cables, ahora desclasificados, muestran cómo la información que el entonces embajador de Estados Unidos, Deane Hinton, transmitía a Washington, fue en escalada progresiva. “No se puede probar ni descartar la violencia contra civiles. La guerrilla no hizo nada para desalojar la zona. Civiles murieron durante la Operación Rescate pero no hay evidencias de que fueran masacrados por el ejército de El Salvador. El número de civiles muertos no se acerca ni por asomo al número descrito por otros reportes internacionales”, decía en un primer cable, en enero de 1981.

Luego, en otro memorando, ya ofrecía una versión de lo que pudo haber ocurrido: “La población estimada del Mozote durante la masacre era de unos 300 habitantes. Batallón Atlacatl condujo la operación rescate del 6 de diciembre al 17 de 1981. La guerrilla conocía la existencia de la operación desde el 15 de noviembre. Los civiles que estuvieron presentes durante la operación y las batallas con la guerrilla podrían haber resultado muertos”.

Antes de que el Times y el Post informaran al mundo de las masacres, a El Salvador, solo la clandestina Radio Venceremos, voz de la guerrilla, la contó.

En la segunda mitad de diciembre del 81, los periódicos de El Salvador solo reportaron lo que informaba el ejército salvadoreño.

La Prensa Gráfica, 10 de diciembre de 1981. (…) Felicidad. Miles de campesinos acuden a saludar a las tropas que están llegando a las zonas que durante varios meses han sido amenazados por los grupos extremistas.

La Prensa Gráfica, 19 de diciembre de 1981. (…) La Fuerza Armada ha considerado como exitosa la Operación Rescate, tanto en el aspecto militar como en el social, ya que miles de campesinos que huyeron del terror que habían implantado los extremistas están regresando paulatinamente a sus terrenos o casas, para rehacer su vida.

Diario Latino, 30 de diciembre de 1981. (…) Afirman que los grupos terroristas han dejado de funcionar con la que lo venían haciendo desde hace algunos días, debido a que se la ha causado una considerable cantidad de bajas entre sus militantes.

Para cuando Pedro Chicas, Rufina Amaya y Juan Bautista pusieron la denuncia, nueve años más tarde, la masacre de El Mozote seguía sin existir. El juez de la causa, Federico Portillo, quería que siguiera sin existir. Los fiscales del caso querían que siguiera sin existir. Sin embargo, dos años después, todo cambiaría, cuando los sobrevivientes se reencontraron, por primera vez, con los huesos de todas sus víctimas.

***

Las inspecciones fueron más rápidas de lo que debieron haber sido.

Rufina Amaya descubrió los huesos de El Mozote el 27 de mayo de 1992. Lo que había contado era cierto. Que los soldados habían asesinado a cientos de niños era cierto. Que habían violado y asesinado a las mujeres más jóvenes en el cerro La Cruz era cierto. Que habían metido ancianos y ancianas en el convento, adonde los masacraron, era cierto. Que habían matado a su marido y a sus cuatro niños era cierto. Cristino, el mayor de esa camada, tenía nueve años; María Isabel, la menor, ocho meses.

Todo lo que Rufina Amaya gritó, muchos años antes, cuando el mundo le dio la espalda, era cierto.

Semanas más tarde, un hombre esperó ansioso a que unos forenses argentinos desenterraran a los suyos. Mientras lo hacían, en su cabeza navegaba el recuerdo de cuando se arrastró, a gatas, para ver cómo habían fracasado sus familiares.Cuando uno de los forenses sustrajo del agujero una muñequita, Sotero Guevara sintió como si esa muñequita fuera Catalina, su hija, el cuerpo que él alumbró con una lámpara durante las noches del 11 y 12 de diciembre de 1981. “Era colochita, bien bonita la muñequita. Me había costado cincuenta centavos. Cuando la vi… ¡Ay Dios! Entonces sí me quebré, mire. Le dije: con su permiso, pero yo me voy a retirar a meditar… y me fui por ahí, a esconderme detrás de un palo”.

En esa exhumación también participó Pedro Chicas, que enseñó dónde estaban sus muertos. Luego dijo que podía enseñar más enterramientos, pero el juez del caso se enojó, ya no quería ver más restos, y lo suspendió todo a las 3:30 de la tarde.

Antonio Pereira se reencontró con los suyos dos meses después, y de nuevo sintió aquel nudo que alguna vez le apretó el pecho, más fuerte, más fuerte, más fuerte, cuando recordó la última vez que vio a su mujer y sus hijos, cuando marchaban, con el pelotón apuntándole sus cañones, hacia la casa donde vivía la familia de un hombre ciego.

Los números 1, 2 y 3 hacen referencia a los primeros tres cadáveres que pudo rescatar el Equipo Argentino de Antropología Forense en El Mozote. Mayo de 1992.

Las masacres de inicios de diciembre de 1981 se extendieron en un radio tan amplio que llegaron hasta una cueva del Cerro Ortiz, en donde se refugiaron algunos sobrevivientes, hasta que los soldados los ubicaron y les lanzaron granadas. Los soldados también llegaron hasta Cerro Pando, el día 13, y ahí acabaron con una comunidad, compuesta en su gran mayoría de familias evangélicas, que se resguardaron adentro de un templo, donde oraban, pidiéndole a Dios que las salvara.

Pero Dios no atendió los ruegos y ahí dejó, que se murieran, orando, mientras los soldados les disparaban.

En las inspecciones y exhumaciones que se realizaron entre 1992 y 1993, a identificar esa masacre llegaron otros sobrevivientes, a los que Juan Bautista conoció mejor en la repatriación de 1989.

Pero las masacres se extendieron en un radio tan amplio, que muchos sobrevivientes nunca han sido escuchados, porque nadie supo de ellos antes o después del paso del ejército por la zona.

Ese es el caso de Anatolio Argueta, un hombre que cuando niño, a los 11 años, se quedó solo en el mundo, porque el ejército le mató a todo: tíos, primos, hermanos, hermanas, sobrinos, abuelos, padres… A 50 parientes le mataron.

Anatolio solo se salvó porque fue un mal hijo, que desobedeció a su padre y se fue con unos primos a ver qué era eso de las escuelas de menores que los guerrilleros estaban inaugurando en unos montes alejados del cantón. Tres días después masacraron a su familia, y hasta muchos días después le llegó a él la noticia.

Lo que más le impresionó a Anatolio cuando regresó a su caserío fue que los zopilotes y los perros habían devorado casi todos los cuerpos. “Solo una niña estaba enterita, porque la mataron en una hamaca, y ahí no la alcanzaban los animales”.

A partir de ese día, Anatolio Argueta se hizo dos promesas: que entonces sí se haría guerrillero, para buscar justicia en la venganza, y que nunca más pondría un pie en la que era su casa. La segunda no la cumplió, porque en un tablón donde antes estaba su casa nos cuenta su historia, 30 años después. La primera tampoco la cumplió porque cuando en la guerra entendió que se estaban matando entre hermanos la venganza ya no tenía sentido.

Por eso, Anatolio Argueta, ahora pide justicia para él y sus familiares.

En ese mismo cantón, Domingo Tobar, un ex soldado que meses antes de las masacres se había convertido en guerrillero, también perdió a su familia. A su mujer, a sus hijos, a sus padres y hermanos. Todo eso le duele a Domingo Tobar, pero lo que más le duele es que 30 años después, sigue sin saber qué le pasó a su bebé de nueve meses. Porque de la bebé no encontró rastros, y eso, ignorar si está viva o está muerta, lo sigue torturando 30 años después… Domingo Tobar sigue buscando el rastro de lo que podría ser un fantasma.

El ejército aniquiló a casi todos los habitantes del caserío Los Argueta, en el cantón Cerro Pando. Cuando Anatolio Argueta buscó a sus víctimas solo encontró a una niña 'secándose' en una hamaca, porque el resto de cuerpos 'habían sido devorados por los

Durante las inspecciones, Juan Bautista también recorrió de nuevo el camino que lo llevó hasta Jocote Amarillo, donde casi muere, por desprevenido, junto a toda su familia, en la mañana del 13 de diciembre de 1981. En los días de las inspecciones, en 1992, Juan Bautista también guió otra expedición.

11 años atrás, después de que intentó sin éxito identificar los restos que había en el terreno de la familia Márquez, en las afueras de El Mozote, cerca de un árbol de manzano, Juan Bautista se topó con un guerrillero que custodiaba la zona. El guerrillero estaba al pie del cerro La Cruz.

Armado, le cercó el paso y le dijo que se retirara, que no iba a dejarlo entrar al caserío, porque era demasiado lo que había ahí, y aunque quisiera, no lo iba a poder soportar.

Juan Bautista, aunque enojado, no tuvo más remedio que aceptar, porque cuando intentó acercarse al terreno de la familia Márquez no soportó la hedentina.

Entonces se le ocurrió que su familia podía haber fracasado en Ranchería, otro caserío cercano a El Mozote, donde de haber huido antes de la masacre, pudo haberse refugiado su mamá.

11 años después, en los días de las inspecciones, Juan Bautista reencontró en Ranchería a sus 19 cadáveres, tal cual y adonde los había dejado la primera vez.

***

Part 5 of the Mozote Massacres

2012-01-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

Capítulo 5. Dos familias, dos masacres

El Batallón Atlacatl masacró a campesinos adentro y afuera de sus viviendas, en una avanzada que tenía como propósito 'quitarle el agua al pez', en alusión a las comunidades cercanas a los territorios controlados por la guerrilla.

La noche del 12 de diciembre de 1981 fue la última noche que agarró a Juan Bautista desprevenido. También fue la última noche que se refugiaría bajo un techo seguro. A partir de esa noche, la luna lo agarraría a él y a su familia en quebradas, montes y matorrales. A sus hijos, incluido uno de dos años, se les extinguiría el llanto y el hambre, y la cocina quedaría relegada para aquellos momentos nocturnos en los que Juan lograría apilar las rocas necesarias para el filtro que escondería el humo que desprenderían las ramas secas.
Al límite. Así aprendieron a vivir Juan Bautista y su familia. Pero eso era mejor que regresar a cualquier casa. El susto que pasarían en Jocote Amarillo les enseñó que había que estar siempre alertas.
El 12 de diciembre, un compa desarmado -porque la guerrilla tenía pocas armas en esa época- le advirtió a Juan que el ejército seguía avanzando, le contó que El Mozote y el cantón La Joya estaban arrasados y los regañó por seguir escondidos donde menos debía. "Juan: vos sos muy confiado para estar en casa”, le dijo, y luego se marchó, en dirección a La Guacamaya.
A la mañana siguiente, Juan Bautista dejó a su mujer en la casa de Santos del Cid, un amigo que les brindó refugio a él y a otros más. A las 6:30 a.m. se movió con sus hijos mayores para inspeccionar el terreno, y luego los dejó cerca de la casa, escondidos entre unas peñas rodeadas por arbustos. Entonces Juan se abrió paso hacia una quebrada cercana, pero se detuvo. En una casa que le quedaba decenas de metros escuchó una tronazón.
Juan Bautista palideció. Tanto, que la impresión aún lo hace dudar de si fue cierto que algunas balas le zumbaron cerca o si se las imaginó. Lo que sí fue cierto es que desanudó el camino que había hecho, regresó a la casa de Santos del Cid pero a ninguna otra más, porque ahora los disparos se escuchaban más cerca. Juan agarró a su mujer, a los niños más pequeños, y se fueron allá adonde había dejado a los más grandes. Se acurrucaron entre las piedras y los arbustos y esperaron. Y esperaron…
Juan Bautista logró salvar a la familia de su anfitrión y a su anfitrión también, pero hubo una mujer a la que no pudo salvar. Se llamaba Genoveva Díaz, quizá con los mismos años que tenía su madre. “¡Aquí es que se esconden los guerrilleros!”, recuerda Juan que gritó un soldado antes de ingresar a la casa donde la única guerrillera que había era una anciana que no podía caminar.
Cuando los soldados dispararon, Juan no pudo ver nada, pero sí lo escuchó todo. Y oír cómo mataban a la anciana, y ver cómo se quemaba la casa después de la balacera, fue para Juan Bautista otra revelación: a esas alturas, él ya sabía que su madre también estaba muerta.
La masacre duró dos horas, aproximadamente. Juan Bautista escuchó y vio lo que pudo. Hubo otro, sin embargo, que un día antes, una masacre antes de la que se salvó Juan Bautista, vio lo que Juan solo alcanzó a escuchar.

***

Cavilando. Así tuvo que haber llegado Antonio Pereira a su milpa, la mañana del 12 de diciembre de 1981. 30 minutos habían pasado desde que él había consolado el miedo de su madre con la misma estrategia que utilizó su mujer para consolarlo a él.
Antonio Pereira, antes irse a trabajar, le había rogado a Natalia Argueta que se escondiera en el río Sapo, ubicado a un kilómetro del caserío Los Toriles. Pero por más que le recordó la advertencia que días atrás había dado una patrulla guerrillera (“salgan de las casas porque los soldados arrasarán con todo”), ella no dejó de creer en otra que habían dado los soldados, semanas antes que los guerrilleros. La de los soldados decía que matarían a aquellos que anduvieran en el monte. Cuando Natalia vio que su marido no cedía, le tocó el punto débil: “Primero Dios no pase nada”.
En el caserío Los Toriles la gran mayoría eran evangélicos.
Antonio Pereira, sin embargo, como a muchos otros, le parecía demasiado extraño que se escucharan tantas detonaciones dos días seguidos, todas provenientes de todas las direcciones. Desde Arambala, el municipio en donde el Batallón Atlacatl había iniciado el operativo, dos días atrás, los soldados venían cercándolo todo en una formación que se asemejaba a la de una herradura.
Vencido por su mujer, Antonio Pereira escondió sus temores y fue a saludar a Simeona, su madre, que vivía en la casa contigua. Entonces, cuando ella le dijo “está feo esto”, antes de despedirse, él le contestó como le había contestado su mujer: “Primero Dios no pase nada”.
El problema es que sí pasó.
Antonio Pereira recién había llegado a su milpa cuando observó que los soldados bajaban por una de las lomas que rodean el caserío. Entonces corrió en dirección a su casa, pero ya no pudo avisarle a nadie porque los soldados habían llegado antes que él.
Cuando la tropa ingresó al caserío, Antonio Pereira ya no supo si había corrido para sacar a su familia de su casa o para meterse junto a ellos, porque el miedo lo obligó a esconderse entre unos matorrales desde donde podía verlo todo: tenía de frente la puerta de su casa y la de su mamá.
Los soldados primero entraron como intrusos por la puerta de su casa, a la fuerza, y en un primer momento Antonio Pereira pensó que a su familia se la llevarían a algún refugio, pero rápido entendió que aquello no era más que un deseo, porque a los refugiados no los sacan encañonados, como sacaban ahora a Natalia, a Mario y a María, en ese orden, que lloraban y marchaban en línea recta, uno detrás del otro, mientras los soldados los arriaban decididos, tanto los de adelante como los de atrás, hasta que todos se perdieron tras unos árboles y una casa, la de Abilio Vigil, quien nunca pudo ver quiénes lo encañonaron a él, a su familia y a la de Antonio, porque Abilio Vigil era ciego.
A partir de ese momento los segundos fueron las hebras de un nudo que en el pecho a Antonio se le amarraba fuerte, que apretaba más fuerte; y se descubrió solo y con dos manos labriegas incapaces de defenderse –y defenderlos- de los soldados que se los habían llevado hasta aquel lugar donde los ojos de Antonio ahora eran tan inútiles como los de Abilio Vigil.
El nudo en su pecho volvió a apretarse fuerte… más fuerte… más fuerte… más fuerte… hasta que los balazos tronaron allá, donde sus ojos ya no llegaban. Fue ahí cuando el nudo se le reventó, revolviéndole todo por dentro, con la furia de un tropel de recuerdos que ahora sentía salvajes.
Mario, su varoncito de 10 años al que le gustaba jugar con las vacas; María, su muchachita de 14 a la que le gustaba ir a la escuela; Natalia, la esposa a quien había conquistado en el pueblo de Jocoaitique, 20 años atrás, habían desaparecido para siempre.
Cuando logró que los ojos se le desempañaran, los soldados ahora caminaban de regreso hacia la casa de su madre, Simeona, de 85 años. Ahí también estaban sus hermanos, Juan Ángel y Bertolino, sus respectivas familias y Nelly, una de sus sobrinas. Los soldados entraron igual pero salieron diferente: ya nadie marchó en línea recta porque arremangaron a la gente contra la pared. A 10 contra la pared. Para entonces, Antonio ya no tenía incertidumbres en la cabeza y lo que estaba a punto de atestiguar serían puras certezas.
—Viera eso, eso es duro: estar viendo que le están matando la familia a uno. Cuesta aguantarse. Y entonces uno piensa: uno solo con las manos, ¿a qué iba a llegar? Hubiera andado algo, tal vez… Pero así nomás, solo a caer allí también... Por eso mejor me quedé, tuve aguante de quedarme y estar viendo.
Nelly, su sobrina, se separó del grupo y rogó para que no mataran a su abuelita, pero más ligero le dieron a ella para que dejara de hacer bulla.
La espalda de un soldado se interpuso entre Nelly y Antonio, que no la volvió a ver sino hasta cuando otro estallido se convirtió en un recuerdo seguido de otro recuerdo: un disparo, un cuerpo de niña de 10 años derrumbándose a los pies de un soldado.
El silencio que produjo ese disparo dio paso al silencio de las víctimas y a la furia desatada de los victimarios, que tampoco dijeron nada. Los únicos que hablaron fueron los fusiles. El grupo contraminado era una rueda humana desordenada, amontonada y temblorosa; el grupo armado eran unas espaldas y unos perfiles sin rostro ni identidad que apenas y se meneaban mientras disparaban. La rueda, con vida, recibió ráfagas provenientes de seis fusiles activados por seis pares de manos. Cuando los fusiles se callaron, el silencio de verdad fue silencio, los cuerpos quedaron amontonados unos sobre otros, y Antonio Pereira creyó que había terminado todo, mas no sabía lo equivocado que estaba.
—El objetivo de ellos era acabar con todo -dice, y recuerda al soldado que se acercó y pinchó el bulto en el que terminó convertido la rueda humana. Luego el soldado se alejó y desde la lejanía les aventó un objeto que Antonio no alcanzó a distinguir pero sí a escuchar. Y la explosión no la escuchó una sino que dos veces más, tres en total –tres en total: uno, dos, tres- hasta que sus familiares quedaron resumidos en otras cosas que ya no podían llamarse cuerpos humanos.
Hoy sí, cuando todo había terminado, Antonio Pereira comprendió que en el mundo ya no habría quién por él. Y eso, todavía hoy, 30 años después, lo hace guardar silencio, guardar silencio, guardar silencio… y se limpia los ojos que no lloran pero que se empañan.
La masacre en Los Toriles duró cuatro horas, desde las 8 de la mañana hasta el mediodía. De las 18 familias que ahí vivían solo una sobrevivió completa, gracias a que la casa se hizo invisible detrás de un cerro. Antonio Pereira salió de su escondite hasta en la noche, bajo la luz de la luna que, según recuerda, durante los días de las masacres alumbro más fuerte que nunca. De noche enterró a sus víctimas, mientras otros tres hombres, amigos de toda la vida antes de la masacre; esposos sin mujer, padres sin hijos después de la masacre, también enterraron a los que pudieron. Cuando todos estuvieron cansados, Antonio decidió por la suerte del resto de cadáveres.
—Les dije: enterremos la familia que es de nosotros para salvar que no se los coman los animales. Los demás ahí que queden porque no se ajusta.
Todos asintieron y se convencieron aún más cuando en la mañana del 13 de diciembre cayeron disparos sobre Los Toriles. Luego de la masacre, el ejército dejó a uno que apuntaba su mira contra los fantasmas. Los muerteros agarraron rumbos distintos en esa guinda y ni alcanzaron a despedirse.
Antonio Pereira recaló en el río Sapo, ubicado a un kilómetro del caserío. A diferencia de Juan Bautista, que en esa misma mañana, en Jocote Amarillo, también corría hasta una casa para salvar a su familia, Antonio Pereira pegó carrera solo y sin familia, y así estuvo durante 15 largos días, y luego durante cuatro largos años.
Cuando se cansó de roer guineos verdes caminó y caminó y caminó hasta que se refugió en un pueblo llamado Masala, donde ya no había soldados ni guerrilleros ni peligros. Todavía hoy no sabe explicarse cómo fue que en medio de tanto sufrimiento le entraron ganas de trabajar. “Solo quería trabajar”, dice. Cuatro años después se casó de nuevo y se hizo una nueva familia. Y entonces caminó y caminó y caminó de nuevo y terminó viviendo en El Mozote, desde donde sale todas las mañanas para ir a cultivar la milpa que le crece allá donde enterró a aquella otra familia que tanto él quería.

Antonio Pereira, de 73 años, perdió a toda su familia en la masacre ocurrida en el caserío Los Toriles, ubicado a dos kilómetros de El Mozote.

Juan Bautista no salió de su escondite, en Jocote Amarillo, sino hasta en la madrugada del 14 de diciembre de 1981.
Cuando él y los suyos salieron, de inmediato caminaron hasta la casa en la que se habían refugiado, y ahí encontraron el cadáver calcinado de la anciana Genoveva Díaz.
Caminaron más y encontraron el de otra mujer, rodeada por cuatro cuerpos de niños también muertos, también calcinados.
En los alrededores de esa casa, bajo la luz de la luna, que lo alumbraba todo, Juan Bautista contó 10 cadáveres más, hasta que se cansó de ver tanta muerte y caminó de regreso con su mujer y sus hijos hacia el monte.
Pasarían varios días para que el miedo lo abandonara por completo. Pero no fue sino hasta cuando se convenció de que las tronazones habían desaparecido cuando decidió regresar a donde todo había comenzado.
—Entonces yo salí de regreso por el mismo camino que ya había pasado, regresé a El Hormiguero. Ahí nos mantuvimos. No recuerdo cuántos días, pero ahí nos estuvimos.
Una mañana, otro compa que se cruzó por El Hormiguero le contó a Juan Bautista que en El Mozote ya no había soldados, porque los habían hecho retroceder más allá de Arambala, el municipio en donde las masacres habían iniciado.
Entonces, resuelto, alistó a su familia y se la llevó hasta las cercanías de El Mozote, donde la dejó escondida, porque a buscar el cadáver de su madre decidió que tenía que ir solo.
Llegó hasta las cercanías del cerro La Cruz, pasó bajo un árbol de manzano pero hasta ahí pudo llegar, porque la hedentina era demasiado poderosa, porque en el terreno de la familia Márquez todo era irreconocible, porque todo estaba quemado hasta los huesos.

Part 4 of the Mozote Massacre Documentary

2012-01-04T08:25:00.000-08:00

Capítulo 4. El hombre gato

El hombre gato bajó de una cumbre, se metió al caserío y cruzó entre dos casas y no se dejó escuchar. Quizá le ayudó el hecho de que era pequeño el hombre gato. Pequeño y sigiloso. Quizá le ayudó también que era de noche. De todos los hombres que estaban esa noche en el caserío, él era el único que no era soldado.
Antes de aventarse al llano que lo separaba de su casa, y del patio de su casa, el hombre gato se acurrucó en la esquina de una pared y olfateó hacia todos lados. También miró hacia arriba y hacia abajo, a un lado y al otro. ¡Tas! Ya estaba el hombre gato más cerca de su casa, arrastrándose entre unos matorrales.
Pero tuvo que detenerse y pensársela bien, antes de intentar otro movimiento veloz. En la casa no se escuchaba ninguna bulla, y había demasiados soldados cerca, como para arriesgarse por la puerta. Lo mejor era bordear, buscar el patio de su casa por una vía más alejada del llano. En esas estaba, cavilando, cuando sintió un golpe en la nuca. “¡Ya me agarraron!”, pensó el hombre gato.
El susto se le pasó cuando se dio cuenta de que un perro vagabundo le había quitado una de sus nueve vidas.
—¡Diomecuarde! Yo me asusté, pego el salto para atrás y el perro hijueputa, hubiera visto…
El hombre gato, después del susto, logró llegar a la fosa que tanto andaba buscando. Él había ayudado a cavarla, por recomendación de los compas, que habían aconsejado eso a los habitantes del cantón La Joya para que se protegieran de los bombardeos. Al hombre gato le habían ayudado, además, sus dos hijos mayores, Santos y José, que para esa fecha ya eran unos prominentes guerrilleros.
-Llego yo, a gatas, para dicha fosa, y andaba un foco (una linterna). Me puse embrocado, en la orilla, y vide…
En la fosa había una docena de cuerpos apilados. El cuerpo que estaba encima de todos era el de una niña que dormía, acurrucadita, encima de los muertos.
El hombre gato estuvo tentado a pararse, como hombre, para que alguien lo viera y lo arrojara junto a esos cuerpos. El hombre gato, lo que más quería en la vida era estar con esos muertos.
No dejó de pensar eso sino hasta cuando se acordó de que en el Cerro Brujo, a tres kilómetros de distancia, había dos niños, agazapados, que lo estaban esperando. Así que retrocedió, de nuevo a gatas, hasta que logró encaramarse en un cerro, mientras dejaba el caserío que a sus espaldas terminaba de extinguirse en llamas.

***

Sotero Guevara hoy tiene 73 años y vive en la comunidad Quebracho junto a su segunda esposa.

Sotero Guevara salió de la cueva en donde se refugiaba en el río La Joya y llegó a la cima del Cerro El Brujo a las 6 de la tarde del 11 de diciembre de 1981. A esa hora había quedado de juntarse ahí, en ese escondite, con su esposa.
Sotero Guevara se había despedido de Petronila a las 3 de la madrugada. Agarró camino para las cuevas junto a sus dos hijos varones, Anastasio y Lucas; y ella se quedó, junto a Catalina, la hija menor de ambos, para echar tortillas, para que en el monte no les agarrara el hambre. Se suponía que Petronila saldría del cantón La Joya inmediatamente después, pero los soldados frustraron sus planes. A las 8 de la mañana, La Joya ya había sido tomada.
Un día antes del inicio de las masacres, una docena de helicópteros volaron encima del cantón La Joya y descargaron soldados en las cumbres de Quebracho y Arada Vieja. Desde esas cumbres, los soldados atacaron y lograron destruir algunas casas. Era un blanco fácil todo allá abajo de esos imponentes cerros que lo cercan todo en los cuatro puntos cardinales. Por su geografía, La Joya es un sumidero, y por eso todos huían hacia las quebradas o hacia los cerros para ocultarse entre el follaje o las vaguadas.
Ese 10 de diciembre, hubo otra mujer que también se despidió de su marido creyendo que podría librarla fácil. Era Rosa Ramírez, la esposa de Pedro Chicas, un hombre alto, grueso y blanco, uno de los líderes del cantón La Joya. “¡Que Dios te ampare entonces, mujer!”, le dijo Pedro Chicas a Rosa, quien se equivocó al creerle a un tío cuando este le dijo que no pasaría nada. Pedro Chicas se fue ese 10 de diciembre a una cueva escondida en el río, y Rosa, que esquivó durante horas a las balas y las bombas, se arrepintió de no haberle hecho caso a su marido. Rosa logró huir hasta muchas horas después de que cesaran las primeras bombas y tronazones, en la madrugada del 11 de diciembre.
Rosa también subió el cerro El Brujo y ahí se juntó con otras familias más, y con Sotero Guevara, que desesperado preguntaba por su mujer y su hija. Rosa Ramírez le dijo que no las había visto, y eso bastó para que Sotero le dejara a Anastasio y Lucas, porque él se regresaría a La Joya por la mujer y la hija que se le habían quedado.
Sotero Guevara hoy es un viejo infinitamente pequeño y delgado. Está lleno de arrugas y da la impresión de que si se le toca muy fuerte, podría quebrarse. Hace 30 años era igual de pequeño, pero su cuerpo no estaba tan marchito. Era ágil, tan ágil como para moverse como la guerra le había enseñado: a gatas.
Aquella noche, hace 30 años, todos le advirtieron que no fuera loco, que si se iba solo sería para ir a fracasar, como habían fracasado ya muchos otros. Los familiares de Sotero que no lograron salir fueron nueve, los de Pedro Chicas fueron 13. Se lo dijeron, que podía fracasar, pero Sotero no entendió razones. Bajó del cerro y en tres horas ya se había puesto en el caserío, que ahora estaba oscuro, silencioso e infestado de soldados.
En una fosa encontró Sotero Guevara a su familia: a Petronila y Catalina, a su hermana Justa, a su sobrina Jacinta y a los hijos de esta: Roque, de 5 años, y María, de seis.
Al siguiente día, Sotero Guevara esperó la noche, la del 12 de diciembre, para convertirse en gato de nuevo. De nuevo le advirtieron y de nuevo regresó a la fosa, se acercó al borde, encendió su lámpara y contempló a sus familiares.
Esa noche Catalina estaba desnuda bajo la luz de la luna. Las llamas la habían dejado limpita.
—Es que yo no hallaba fundamento. Yo quería estar allí con los muertos. Para qué le voy a mentir… allí quería estar –dice Sotero Guevara.
Cuando regresó al cerro El Brujo, le contó al resto de refugiados que en La Joya ya no quedaba nada, que lo habían arrasado y quemado todo. El grupo, entonces, decidió separarse. Hubo unos que se fueron con Rosa Ramírez y los familiares de Pedro Chicas, en dirección a unos descampados en donde podían encontrar ranchos abandonados. Otras familias tomaron otras direcciones y Sotero Guevara decidió quedarse, con sus hijos, cerca de La Joya.
A los ocho días, la familia de Pedro Chicas, con Pedro Chicas incluido, se reencontró con Sotero Guevara en el llano de La Joya. Mientras enterraban a los muertos que podían, le contaron que habían sobrevivido en los descampados del El Rincón, pero que unas patrullas los habían corrido hasta Jocote Amarillo, donde descubrieron que también había ocurrido otra desgracia.
Y esa, de la que hablaba la familia de Pedro Chicas, fue en la que por poco asesinan a toda la familia de Juan Bautista.

Chapter 3 of the Mozote Massacres

2012-01-04T08:24:00.000-08:00

Capítulo 3. Las aventuras y desventuras de Quicón y Felipón

Es la noche del 19 de julio de 1979. En las montañas de la zona norte de Morazán truenan los morteros y sale humo, pero no de incendios ni ajusticiamientos, sino que estruendo y humo de petardos y de hogueras que celebran, como si fuera propia, la fiesta que en Nicaragua apenas comienza.
Allá, ese día, las columnas guerrilleras del Frente Sandinista para la Liberación Nacional entraron en Managua, la capital de ese pobre país, apoyadas por el pueblo, para consumar la derrota de Anastasio Somoza Debayle, para consumar el triunfo de la revolución sandinista.
En El Salvador, donde muchos andaban buscando también un triunfo similar, los vasos comunicantes entre los sandinistas y la incipiente guerrilla salvadoreña ya habían cruzado casi todo el país, de punta a punta. En el oriente aguantaron el calor de esas ciudades, se escondieron de los cuarteles y huyeron de infinidad de persecuciones. Aguardaron por años para que el pensamiento y los planes maduraran, fluyeran, cuesta arriba, sobre la calle negra.
Hasta que todo fue propicio, y los vasos comunicantes llegaron donde Andrés Barrera, un hombre al que la mañana del 20 de julio lo cogió desvelado y festejado en una hamaca, larga como él, hasta donde llegaron dos jóvenes, que le conocían, para molestarlo. Uno de ellos se llamaba Pancho.
—Estos catequistas son jodidos –le dijo Pancho a su acompañante-. Han amanecido desvelados ahora porque anduvieron haciendo fiesta anoche. Andrés Barrera se recompuso, miró serio a los dos visitantes, con dos ojos que de claros en ese momento no tenían nada, y adoptó una guardia que le exigía el guerrillero que ya llevaba adentro: ese al que llamaban con el seudónimo de Felipón, los que le sabían las andadas. Y quienes conocían esa otra cara, tenían que andar en lo mismo, porque de lo contrario no podían ser otra cosa más que orejas, informantes del ejército. Pancho y su amigo no caminaban por los mismos senderos de la guerrilla, y por eso se puso en guardia Felipón, porque Morazán sudaba desconfianzas.
—¿Allá andabas vos, pues? – preguntó Andrés, serio, intentando zanjar el tema.
—No, pero por ahí dicen que ustedes eran… ¡Esos catequistas son guerrilleros! –soltó Pancho, con una mueca irónica, para la aflicción de Andrés.
Descubierto, Felipón improvisó:
—Mira: por favor, esa broma si la están haciendo en serio, por favor que sea una broma. Porque si van a informar a la guardia, me van a venir a masacrar a toda mi gente aquí, a toda mi familia y a toda la comunidad…
—¡Ya se enojó! –dijo Pancho, riendo-. ¡Son bromas, homb´e! No se enoje.
Pero Felipón quedó enojado, y a finales de ese año se desquitó de Pancho. Le habían encomendado hacer una requisa de armas, y como sabía que el muchacho portaba una, hasta su casa lo fue a buscar. Cuando Pancho se dio cuenta de que la cosa iba en serio, dejó de decir que no tenía el arma y se la entregó. Con todo y municiones.
—O te organizás o te calmás, y dejás de andar hablando tonteras. La cosa así es: ahora ya se descubrió esta cuestión y ahora no hay de otra: los que están con los pobres ya se va a ver, y los que están con los ricos, la fuerza armada y las autoridades represivas también ya se va a ver. Así que ahí ves de cuál lado te vas, porque hoy sí ya se descubrió esta cosa.

Tras las masacres de El Mozote, Andrés Barrera compuso una canción en honor a las víctimas y fundó el grupo musical Los Torogoces de Morazán

* * *

Andrés Barrera no era el único guerrillero en La Guacamaya, ni en el municipio de Arambala, ni en el de Jocoaitique, ni en Joateca, ni en Perquín ni en Torola, ni en San Fernando, ni en Meanguera… Andrés Barrera era uno de cientos de campesinos que se habían ido formando por tandas, desde 1972.
Todos eran hombres que bajaron de las montañas para recibir unos cursillos impartidos por unos catequistas católicos que se habían instalado en el departamento de San Miguel.
Andrés Barrera, eso sí, no había sido el primero en irse de La Guacamaya para recibir la palabra de Dios, los cursos de primeros auxilios, las inducciones sobre igualdad social, los cursos de organización clandestina, y el uso de armas. Todo por etapas, todo enseñado por diferentes profesores. La palabra de Dios, los primeros auxilios y las lecciones sobre igualdad social u organización comunal era enseñanzas de los curas. “Lo otro lo venían a enseñar unos compas con más trayectoria”, recuerda el primero de La Guacamaya que se fue a recibir esos cursos, en 1972. Su nombre es Tereso de Jesús Márquez, amigo y vecino, en esa época, de Andrés Barrera.
Campesino y sin estudios –apenas tenía segundo grado- Tereso se emocionó con la lectura bíblica, con las clases en las que aprendió a inyectar y con unas palabras que en la cabeza le revoloteaban como mariposas libertarias: igualdad, derechos, igualdad, derechos…
Cuando regresó a La Guacamaya, semanas después, rápido convenció a uno de sus mejores amigos, y entonces Andrés Barrera también quedó sintiendo las mismas mariposas locas en la cabeza.

Con el tiempo, Andrés Barrera se convirtió en encargado, en La Guacamaya, de una de las primeras células guerrilleras de lo que después sería el Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo, que comandaba el frente de guerra en Morazán. Tereso, convertido en “Quicón”, vagó por todos los cerros haciendo lo mismo que alguna vez hizo Jesús de Nazaret, con la diferencia de que él, cuando salía a pescar más hombres para la causa, siempre iba acompañado de dos escoltas y una carabina.

Tereso de Jesús Márquez fue uno de los primeros campesinos “catequistas” del cantón La Guacamaya, que luego de recibir cursos de orientación cristiana y de primeros auxilios se convirtió en guerrillero.

***

Las aventuras de Quicón y Felipón fueron aventuras de guerreros clandestinos hasta que la guerra, injusta, se las cobró bastante caro.
Contrario a cualquier lógica conocida por Andrés y Tereso, el ejército les demostró que podía darles grandes sorpresas. Nunca se imaginaron ellos, ni nadie, que las familias que no lograron huir del campamento ubicado en La Guacamaya serían asesinadas de manera salvaje por los soldados, el 11 de octubre de 1980, un año antes de todas las masacres de El Mozote.
El operativo militar había arrancado en Perquín, en la cumbre del departamento, y luego bajó por Torola, se metió por El Rosario, cruzó la calle negra, y se metió en La Guacamaya, de donde no habían logrado salir todos.
Ese día, Felipón, como encargado del campamento, movilizó a toda la gente hacia el río Sapo, para esconderla ahí. Entre el grupo iban su esposa, Maclovia Márquez; y su suegra, Heriberta Márquez. Iban también todos sus hijos, que sumaban nueve, más uno que todavía no había nacido.
Por este último, Maclovia detuvo la marcha, y le dijo a Andrés que hasta ahí llegaba, hasta la primera cumbre que la alejaba de La Guacamaya. “Yo ya no aguanto caminar”, le dijo, mientras se colocaba la mano derecha en la cadera, que sostenía una panza que ya casi le reventaba.
Andrés, indeciso, fue vencido por las responsabilidades de Felipón, que tenía que proteger a las familias del campamento, compuesto por unas 300 gentes. Entonces aceptó que se quedaran atrás su mujer, su suegra, y sus cinco hijos pequeños, que andaban entre los 11 años y los 17 meses, más el que estaba por nacer. Los más grandes, los más jóvenes, se quedaron con su padre.
A los días de esa primera masacre, Andrés Barrera regresó a La Guacamaya, y en el lugar donde asesinaron a su mujer, a su suegra y a sus hijos solo encontró un sostén. “Estaba empapado de sangre, todavía húmedo. Y un codito de un niño. Fueron los que logré enterrar, al lado de donde me los habían enterrado unos compas”.
Entre la gente que logró huir iba Tereso de Jesús, junto a la mayoría de sus familiares. A Tereso también le mataron una tía, hermana de su papá, que aceptó quedarse para cuidar a su hija, y a los hijos más pequeños de su hija, que, embarazada, ya no aguantó el paso del campamento. “Maclovia era mi prima”, dice, entre sollozos, con la voz quebrada, Tereso de Jesús Márquez.
Ahora ni la cólera que les provocó tanta muerte, que los estimularía durante 12 años para guerrear con más fuerza, los consuela del todo. Ganó el país, dicen, ganó la paz, ganó la democracia. Pero a costa de un gran sacrificio que duele, dicen, sobre todo porque no hay justicia ni para sus inocentes ni para los de los demás, que pagaron por ellos, ellos que hasta ya perdieron aquella esperanza que les decía, al oído, que todo iba a cambiar.
—Fueron heridas un poco... que no tan luego se pueden cicatrizar... Yo me alegro cuando veo gente que a diferencia de cómo las conocí… y ahora con los buenos carros, buena casa… Y todo eso gracias a esta revolución que se hizo, que costó un precio alto de sacrificio y de sangre. Por lo menos algotros no quedamos tan fregados –dice Felipón, mientras sonríe, con una mueca irónica que le nace en el labio superior, rompiéndole las arrugas.
Tras la masacre de La Guacamaya, en octubre de 1980, Felipón y Quicón siguieron con sus andanzas. Quicón buscó entre los caseríos a más guerrilleros, hasta que en enero de 1981 llegó a El Mozote, donde nunca consiguió uno solo, apenas algunos colaboradores. Entre estos, uno que se llamaba Marcos Díaz, que era comerciante, que había sido soldado, y que colaboraba con ambos bandos, porque los colaboradores respondían a las órdenes de los colaborados.
A dos cosas llegó esa vez Quicón: a hacer lo que ya bien sabía, y a despedirse, obligado, de una tía. Esa vez, Clementina Argueta le dijo a Tereso: “¡Ya no vengás, ya no vengás, que por tu culpa nos van a matar!”. Enmudecido y triste, sin poder defenderse, Tereso le dijo adiós a Clementina, a su tío Cesáreo y a su prima Hilda. 11 meses más tarde, el 11 de diciembre de 1981, morirían masacrados todos ellos, más otro primo llamado José, y los tres hijos, niños todos, de Hilda.
La despedida que Felipón le dio a El Mozote tuvo que ver más con la lejanía, los disparos, las montañas y el humo. La célula guerrillera de La Guacamaya se había desplazado hacia un lugar llamado Las Pilas, cuando se enteró del operativo que realizaría el Ejército en toda la zona. Las Pilas es una cumbre ubicada en una dirección opuesta a otra cumbre, desde donde Juan Bautista, que huía del caserío El Hormiguero, del cantón La Joya, observaba lo mismo que el guerrillero Felipón.
—De ahí divisábamos para el llano, para toda esa zona. Se oía la tirazón y se veían las humazones de las casitas. Por donde quieran se miraba las humazones de esos cerros.

Chapter 2 of the Mozote Massacres

2012-01-04T08:18:00.000-08:00

Capítulo 2. Los escapes de Juan Bautista

Así era el caserío El Mozote antes de la masacre. Sus habitantes –alrededor de 300- vivían de cultivar la tierra y de la comercialización del henequén.

Juan Bautista no era un hombre feliz aquella mañana del 9 de diciembre de 1981. Consternado por la bomba que había estallado en el caserío, y por los llantos de los familiares del niño y del anciano a quienes esta había afectado, acababa de entrar al terreno de la familia Márquez, en donde quería resguardarse su madre, y es posible que algo le afligiera por dentro. Juan Bautista, entonces con 40 años y la piel más despegada de los huesos, presintió que competiría en una carrera desigual contra la muerte.
Pocos días tenía Juan Bautista como refugiado en El Mozote, un caserío grande y poblado, con un llano en el centro, con cancha de fútbol en las afueras, con escuela, parroquia y un cerro centinela llamado “La Cruz”, que fingía protegerlo todo. A todos. Estaba ahí porque donde vivía, en otro caserío cercano llamado Los González, un soldado patrullero le había aconsejado que huyera, porque se asomaba una nube ofensiva contra la guerrilla y contra todos aquellos que colaboraran con los compas.
Juan Bautista, que sabía que eso de “colaborar” dependía del momento y de la orden del colaborado, se enojó. A su hermano, Nicolás, que había colaborado –en realidad había sido soldado de cuartel, hecho y derecho-, se lo habían matado un año antes, el 30 de septiembre de 1980, otros soldados como Nicolás. “Lo mataron y a mí no se me olvida”, dice Juan. ¿Y por qué lo mataron? Porque sospecharon que era guerrillero. “¿Qué tipo de guerrillero sería este que mataron?”, se pregunta Juan, todavía con rabia, y describe a su hermano: ex comandante con carné y con permiso para portar arma, porque los comandantes de otras épocas podían andar armados.
El 30 de septiembre de 1980, frente a la alcaldía de Jocoaitique, un poblado también escondido entre las montañas de Morazán, pero al sur de El Mozote y del otro lado de la calle negra, una sospecha mató a Nicolás, porque como colaboraba con la guerrilla…
Alguna vez sospecharon los guerrilleros de Juan Bautista, porque él también, 20 años más joven, había prestado servicio militar, y portaba un salvoconducto del cuartel de San Francisco Gotera, que más de alguna vez lo había sacado de más de algún apuro con los soldados, a quienes les temía más - después de lo de su hermano- que a los guerrilleros, que le ganaron confianza cuando vieron que Juan Bautista, en lugar de soplarlos, les avisaba por dónde se movía la tropa militar, cuando esta pasaba cerca de Los González.
Así que tras la advertencia de aquel soldado patrullero, sin colaboración de guerrilleros ni de soldados, Juan Bautista armó sus maletas, cargó a su familia y se fue a refugiar a El Mozote.
Y Juan Bautista no fue el único forastero que llegó a El Mozote en esos días.
Entre los huecos que dejaban las montañas se había colado un viento que decía que a un comerciante, llamado Marcos Díaz, colaborador del ejército, los soldados le habían dicho que si la gente de los cantones y caseríos aledaños se aglutinaba en El Mozote, no les pasaría nada. Muchos llegaron entonces, como Juan Bautista, con la diferencia de que muchos, muchísimos, ahí se quedaron para siempre.
Ese 9 de diciembre de 1981 lo cambió todo para Juan Bautista, que vio en ese bombazo que reventó en el caserío una revelación: había que huir de nuevo, hacia cualquier otra parte que estuviera alejada de las balas y las bombas.
A El Mozote esa bomba no le tocaba, pero le cayó, porque alguien calculó mal la distancia del objetivo, que estaba en otro caserío ubicado a dos kilómetros, llamado El Portillón, donde soldados y guerrilleros se disparaban a muerte. El operativo Yunque y Martillo de la Fuerza Armada había iniciado. Y Juan, que tenía buen oído, entendió que aquel tronar de las balas y la explosión de las bombas, que se escuchaban cada vez más fuertes y más cercanas, eran el pitazo de salida para largar a toda prisa en la primera de sus guindas.
—¡Tenemos que irnos, mamá! –le dijo Juan Bautista a Isabel Argueta, de 60 años.
—Andate vos, hijo, para que te defendás vos y a esos niños. A mí me venís a buscar ahí por la casa donde el compadre José María –le dijo, quizá porque creía que en El Mozote no ocurriría nada.
José María era el hermano de Santos Márquez, ese hombre de 40 años que recién había viajado a Lourdes, Colón, para despedirse -para siempre y sin saberlo- de su hijo mayor, Orlando, que se había ido a vivir hasta allá para huir de la guerra.
Atribulado por la decisión de su madre, Juan Bautista se despidió y caminó bajo un árbol de manzano antes de alejarse de los terrenos de la familia de los dos hermanos Márquez. Allá, lejos, en el monte, lo esperaban su mujer y sus seis hijos.

***

Juan Bautista hoy tiene 72 años y vive en la comunidad Segundo Montes de Morazán. En El Mozote cultiva maíz y vende lazos de atar, a un dólar. Los lazos son de fibra de henequén, un cultivo que cayó en desuso después de la guerra.

A 30 años de distancia debería ser motivo de llanto el revisar las colecciones de los diarios de esa época y caer en cuenta de que esta historia nunca existió.
“Inició ayer operación de contrainsurgencia la F.A. (Fuerza Armada)”, tituló el matutino La Prensa Gráfica en un amplio reportaje que apareció publicado el 9 de diciembre de 1981.
La nota hablaba de la toma de Morazán por parte del ejército, del control de la zona, de la prohibición del acceso a la Cruz Roja salvadoreña y otras entidades de servicio humanitario para evitar “cualquier lamentable hecho desagradable”.
“Lo más violento de las operaciones podría llegar en las próximas horas, ya que la tropa sigue su marcha en busca de contacto con los grupos terroristas escondidos en tatus, bosques y montañas del departamento de Morazán, según revelaron fuentes militares”, imprimió el matutino.
Un cable emitido un día antes por la United Press International le puso nombre al comando que dirigiría el operativo:“Fuerzas del gobierno, encabezadas por soldados entrenados por los Boinas Verdes norteamericanos, iniciaron una ofensiva contra los guerrilleros en del departamento de Morazán (…) contingentes de las provinciales capitales de San Miguel, La Unión y Usulután, así como la Brigada de Infantería Atlacatl, adiestrados por los Boinas Verdes fueron los asignados a la ofensiva”.
¿Cuántos ojos habrán leído estas notas, sin imaginarse que en los bosques y las montañas quienes correrían para esconderse eran decenas de Juanes Bautistas? ¿Quién habrá imaginado que en nueve poblados de Morazán serían niños, en su gran mayoría, los “terroristas” con los que fieros soldados habrían de entablar combate los días que le sucedieron al 9 de diciembre de 1981?
El 9 de diciembre podría ser recordado, entonces, como el día en el que un fantasma vagó tan lejos como pudo para alejarse de los ojos de los soldados, que sin saberlo él ni ellos, a cada hora le cercaban más el paso. ¿Quién iba a imaginarlo? Ni él lo imaginaba, pero la noche del 9 de diciembre, en el caserío El Hormiguero, del cantón La Joya, ubicado al sur de El Mozote, sería su última noche en paz.

***

Sus hijos apenas y podían conciliar el sueño con todas las detonaciones que se escuchaban cada vez más cerca, la noche del 11 de diciembre de 1981. Por primera vez, Juan Bautista andaba cabizbajo y deprimido, con el pensamiento puesto en El Mozote, donde había dejado a su mamá. No reaccionaba, y si dos días antes había salido corriendo de allá, por culpa de las balas que sonaban demasiado cerca, ahora no hacía nada, solo esperar y esperar que algo ocurriera.
Por suerte para él y para su familia, lo que ocurrió es que otro sobreviviente, que sabía del paradero de Juan Bautista, arriesgó la vida para venir a advertirle que los soldados acababan de arrasarlo todo en el caserío El Potrero, del cantón La Joya. Y ahora marchaban en dirección hacia El Hormiguero.
—Como ellos sabían que solo yo andaba bastantes niños, llegaron a sacarme de la casa y me dijeron: “Mire, don Juan, levántese y vea para dónde se va porque a nosotros ya nos mataron toda la familia, toda la gente de El Potrero” –recuerda Juan.
A las 10 de la noche del 11 de diciembre de 1981, Juan Bautista corrió de nuevo, hacia el monte, junto a su familia. Antes de desaparecer entre los matorrales que mordían una cumbre, Juan Bautista se detuvo y retrocedió la vista solo para contemplar que los cerros que escondían al cantón La Joya y a El Mozote se habían transformado en diminutos volcanes que escupían humo.

Las Massacres de El Mozote Chapter 1

2012-01-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

The following is a documentary on the Mozote Massacres written by Daniel Valencia Caravantes published by ElFaro.

Capítulo 1. Los huesos
Idalia, la nieta de Orlando Márquez, está hipnotizada por la pantalla del televisor, sentada en una silla plástica, con las piernas dobladas. Idalia tiene seis años y se entretiene con una carrera de atletismo en una casa perdida entre las montañas del oriente de El Salvador. Detrás de la niña, en otra silla, descansan dos de sus bisabuelos y tres de sus tíos. El televisor transmite la edición 16 de los Juegos Panamericanos que se celebran en Guadalajara, México. Es la segunda semifinal de los 200 metros planos y la velocista cubana Nelkis Casabona está en posición de salida. Nelkis arranca y corre, corre y corre hacia la meta… 24 segundos después, las cámaras la muestran caminando con los brazos que le cuelgan aguados a los costados, mientras el estadio estalla en aplausos. La habitación donde están Idalia y sus dos bisabuelos y sus tres tíos también estalla en aplausos, pero la única que aplaude es Idalia, porque sus bisabuelos y sus tíos están muertos.
Es la tarde del miércoles 26 de octubre, y Míriam Núñez, la esposa de Orlando Márquez, toma entre sus manos a los dos bisabuelos y a los tres tíos de Idalia, que descansan en la silla de atrás, dentro de un saco de yute. Abandona la habitación y sale hacia un pequeño patio contiguo a una pequeña casa con paredes de concreto. Después regresa por la silla. Pone el saco sobre la silla y lo abre. Adentro hay dos bolsas plásticas. Toma la más grande y la coloca en este suelo donde hace un año cavaron las bases de su nueva casa.
—Yo le insistí a Orlando que construyéramos aquí, y mire: nunca imaginamos. Fue como si quisieran que los encontráramos -dice Míriam.
Quienes parecieran desear que se les encontrase son los bisabuelos Santos y Agustina, y los tíos José, Edith y Yesenia. Míriam explora el saco y las bolsas dentro del saco.
—Mire –dice, al mostrar el contenido. Hay huesos largos, huesos color café, huesos terrosos, huesos porosos, huesos quemados… Hay también pedacitos de huesos tan pequeños como una canica. O quizá más pequeños. Pone una bolsa en el suelo y saca retazos de ropa: de camisas, de pantalones, de vestido, sandalias de mujer, zapatitos de niña…
—Mire –repite, mientras su mano saca más de los bisabuelos y tíos de Idalia. Aparecen unos jirones de tela quemados y en la bolsa más pequeña una dentadura pegada a una quijada. También hay dientes: mínimos y de color café.
—Aquí los tenemos, mire: aquí están los restos de mi suegra y de mi suegro, y de los hermanos más pequeños de mi esposo –dice Míriam, mientras coloca un hueso sobre otro, encima de la silla en donde antes descansaban.

Los huesos de la familia Márquez aparecieron el 12 de noviembre de 2010, luego de que un albañil cavara una zanja en donde se levantaron las bases de una casa de concreto.

* * *

Orlando Márquez presintió que aquella sería la última vez que charlaría con Santos, y por eso platicaron y platicaron y platicaron, hasta que se dieron cuenta de que el autobús había ingresado a San Martín, un municipio alejado varios kilómetros al oriente de la terminal de buses en donde Orlando tuvo que haberse bajado, en San Salvador.
Una de las dos cosas que recuerda Orlando de aquella larga y última charla que sostuvo con su padre, el domingo 29 de noviembre de 1981, fue el consejo que Santos le dio para administrar mejor el dinero.
—Ahorrá. Te va a servir en el futuro –le aconsejó.
—Es mi gusto darle estas cosas... Ahí también van unos cortes para usted –respondió el hijo, mientras enumeraba los regalos que iban en la bolsa: ropa interior para su mamá, vestidos para sus hermanas y zapatos para su hermano.
Orlando también intentaba persuadir a Santos, una vez más, de que sacara a la familia de El Mozote, un caserío escondido en las montañas del norte de Morazán, en el municipio de Arambala.
—Yo sí quisiera venirme, hijo –le dijo Santos a Orlando-. Pero tu mamá quiere quedarse allá, y si tu mamá quiere quedarse, entonces yo me quedo con ella.
—Vénganse conmigo, papá. Aquí es más seguro –insistió Orlando.
—Vamos a ver qué dice tu mamá.

* * *

Orlando Márquez había huido de El Mozote a los 22 años. Era 1980 cuando supo que le temía a cuatro cosas: que lo reclutara el ejército, que lo reclutara la guerrilla, que lo matara el ejército o que lo matara la guerrilla. No había nada claro en las montañas de Morazán para esa época, excepto que no había grises, solo blanco o negro. Entonces o se era de un bando o se era del otro; se colaboraba con uno o con los dos; o se huía de los dos.
Orlando Márquez escogió la última de las opciones y decidió probar suerte muy lejos, porque lo último que quería era terminar cargando un fusil, o que lo terminaran cargando a él, muerto, cuando él ya había cargado demasiados cuadernos. Orlando Márquez no estaba hecho para la guerra.
En los dos años siguientes visitó solo dos veces a su familia, porque el norte de Morazán era un territorio lleno de ojos desconfiados, escondidos en cada esquina y en cada cerro. Subir era un calvario peligroso. En aquellos días, las sospechas y sus portadores con frecuencia terminaban aniquilados antes de convertirse en certezas.
Alejado un centenar de kilómetros, y para agilizar sus trámites laborales, Orlando había cambiado el domicilio que registraba su cédula de identidad. En el documento decía que era originario de El Mozote, Morazán, pero que vivía en Lourdes, Colón, La Libertad.
En aquellos años, la calle negra, como le llaman aún a la calle asfaltada que nace en San Francisco Gotera, la cabecera departamental, y termina en Perquín, un pueblo encumbrado entre pinos y cipreses, era la única ruta directa para llegar a cualquier parte del norte del departamento, fronterizo con Honduras. Todos los que subían en autobús (como los que caminaban o iban en sus propios transportes) tenían que identificarse en tres retenes militares distribuidos a lo largo de esa carretera. En esos retenes había soldados malencarados que manipulaban unas listas infestadas con nombres. Para el ejército, Morazán era cuna de subversivos y había que hacer de todo para encontrarlos y exterminarlos, como muy bien lo sabían hacer los regímenes de la época, con todos aquellos que no comulgaban con la bota y el fusil, fueran guerrilleros o no.
En el último viaje que hizo a El Mozote, en enero de 1981, un soldado le cuestionó a Orlando esa incongruencia en su cédula, y aunque las preguntas no pasaron a más, Orlando temió que en un futuro la sospecha fuera más fuerte que cualquier explicación. Lo mismo pensó que le podría ocurrir si el documento lo revisaba una patrulla guerrillera. “Cualquiera podía decir que yo era oreja y ahí no más hubiera terminado”, dice.
10 meses después de su última visita a El Mozote, fue Santos quien viajó a la inversa para visitarlo. Compartieron un fin de semana hasta que se despidieron en la parada del poblado de San Martín.
Semanas después, el 23 de diciembre de 1981, a la casa de Orlando llegó un telegrama. Una vieja amiga de la familia le pedía que se presentara a la caseta telefónica del pueblo, a las 6 de la tarde del siguiente día, para recibir una noticia. El telegrama era de carácter urgente.
A la 6 de la tarde de esa Nochebuena Orlando contestó una llamada y al otro lado la mujer solo lloraba y lloraba.
—¿¡Qué ha pasado, pues!? –preguntó Orlando a la mujer, cuando se cansó de tanto llanto.
La amiga se recompuso y le dio la noticia:
—¡Pídale fuerzas a Dios, Orlando, porque a su familia ya no la volverá a ver!
Orlando guardó silencio mientras el cuerpo se le congelaba.
—Han matado a todos en El Mozote, les han rociado gasolina y les han prendido fuego.

Orlando sintió como que abandonaba este mundo.

Orlando Márquez no regresó a la casa de sus padres sino hasta 12 años después, en 1993, un año después de finalizada la guerra. Se sorprendió al ver que El Mozote se había convertido en un pueblo fantasma: sin gente, sin casas, con matorrales tan altos como él. Cuando llegó al terreno de sus padres solo encontró un par de paredes quemadas y pequeños recuerdos de otra época: el tizón para marcar ganado, algunas vasijas quebradas de su madre...
Acongojado, regresó hasta su comunidad, en Lourdes.
Pero en el año 2000 le llegaron nuevas noticias sobre El Mozote. En el pueblo había cada vez más repobladores y él decidió ir a proteger el terreno de su familia con cercos y alambres. Con el tiempo se cansó de poner el cerco y encontrarlo meses después arrancado. Jubilado, decidió instalarse por temporadas largas, que intercalaba con viajes frecuentes a Lourdes, donde lo esperaban su esposa e hijos.
Cinco años más tarde las noticias viajaron a la inversa. Lourdes cambió demasiado y la colonia donde vivía su familia se había convertido en un territorio controlado por la Mara Salvatrucha, una de las pandillas más violentas del mundo. Míriam le contaba que a los compañeros de colegio de sus hijos los estaban asesinando, le dijo que a veces, en las noches, se escuchaban gritos desgarradores, como de gente torturada. Un amanecer, después de una noche de gritos, Míriam supo que cerca de la colonia apareció la cabeza decapitada de una mujer.
Fue entonces cuando Orlando decidió que la nueva familia Márquez repoblaría también El Mozote, el lugar del que había huido por culpa de una guerra, el lugar al que regresaría para refugiarse de otra.

***

Míriam Núñez deja los huesos en la silla y se dirige con paso veloz al cuarto en donde su nieta sigue viendo las carreras. A la casa ha llegado un visitante, Juan Bautista Márquez, un pariente lejano de su esposo, Orlando. Segundos después regresa emocionada, con otra bolsa, más pequeña que todas las anteriores.
Es la primera vez que Míriam ve a Juan; un viejo pequeño, blanco y flacucho que carga en la cabeza un sombrero, en el hombro izquierdo un maletín y en la mano una cuma.
Antes de que Míriam fuera a traer la bolsa, ambos habían caído en la misma conclusión respecto a la dentadura que había sacado del saco. Según Juan, esa dentadura tenía que ser del finado Santos, porque era muy grande para ser de un niño y porque no podía ser la de Agustina, dado que él la conoció bien como para saber que esos no eran sus dientes. Míriam asintió y le pidió que esperara. Luego regresó con la otra bolsa y sacó de ellas dos dentaduras postizas en perfecto estado.
—Esta es la dentadura de mi suegra –dijo Míriam.
—¡Esa sí, mire! Yo la conocí bien a la finada Agustina, porque le venía a comprar cuajadas. Todavía tiene los dientes de oro, mire… ¡Qué barbaridaaad!
Juan Bautista contempla la dentadura y los huesos y aunque esta no es la primera vez que mira a un amigo resumido en ese estado, el impacto es tan poderoso como para que todo le siga pareciendo increíble. “¡Qué barbaridaaaad!”, repite, mientras se frota la frente.
Orlando Márquez aparece luego: alto, grueso y moreno. Juan Bautista se le acerca a Orlando en silencio, y cuando Orlando termina de hablar, el viejo le pide que ahora lo escuche a él, porque hay algo que nunca le ha contado.
—Yo vine aquí, Orlando. Yo vine después de las masacres, pero no vi nada Orlando. Quise venir a ver porque yo los conocía a todos ellos. Eran los compadres de mi papá. Aquí venía a comprar azúcar y cuajadas de la finada Agustina. ¡Viera qué cuajadas hacía! Pero es que no se aguantaba la hedentina, Orlando. Y eso me imposibilitó…
Juan Bautista sigue hablando con Orlando Márquez pero lo que le cuenta es apenas el final de muchos escapes que tuvo que hacer para salvarse del Batallón Atlacatl, una unidad élite del ejército salvadoreño entrenada en Estados Unidos, que en cuestión de tres días aniquiló a un millar de personas entre hombres, mujeres, ancianos y niños en siete caseríos del norte de Morazán, en diciembre de 1981.
Y esa, la carrera de Juan Bautista contra la muerte, inicia y termina justo en esta meta, bajo la sombra del árbol de manzano que custodia el terreno y los huesos de la familia de Orlando Márquez. Pero para conocer todo lo que Juan Bautista recorrió, vio y escuchó, habrá que regresar en el tiempo, 30 años hacia atrás, al inicio de todas las masacres de El Mozote.

U.S. Supreme Court Has Agreed to Rule on State Immigration Laws

2011-12-12T11:23:00.000-08:00

The United States Supreme Court agreed today to rule on the issue of State immigration laws, particularly Arizona's, which targets illiegal immigrants. Arguments for this case are expected to begin in April and the case will be known as Arizona v. U.S., 11-182.

The following is a detailed report from the Gainesville Times concerning this case:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court agreed Monday to rule on Arizona's controversial law targeting illegal immigrants, setting the stage for an election-year decision on an issue that is already shaping presidential politics.

The justices said they will review a federal appeals court ruling that blocked several tough provisions in the Arizona law. One of those requires that police, while enforcing other laws, question a person's immigration status if officers suspect he is in the country illegally.

The Obama administration challenged the Arizona law by arguing that regulating immigration is the job of the federal government, not states. Similar laws in Alabama, South Carolina and Utah also are facing administration lawsuits. Private groups are suing over immigration measures adopted in Georgia and Indiana.

The court now has three politically charged cases on its election-year calendar. The other two are President Barack Obama's health care overhaul and new electoral maps for Texas' legislature and congressional delegation.

Justice Elena Kagan will not take part in the Arizona case, presumably because of her work on the issue when she served in the Justice Department.

Arguments probably will take place in late April, which would give the court roughly two months to decide the case.

Some 12 million illegal immigrants are believed to live in the United States, and the issue already is becoming a factor in the 2012 campaign. Republican Sen. John McCain said recently that large Hispanic populations in his home state of Arizona and elsewhere are listening carefully to what Republican candidates have to say on immigration.

The immigration case before the Supreme Court stems from the Obama administration's furious legal fight against a patchwork of state laws targeting illegal immigrants.

Arizona wants the justices to allow the state to begin enforcing measures that have been blocked by lower courts at the administration's request.

The state says that the federal government isn't doing enough to address illegal immigration and that border states are suffering disproportionately.

In urging the court to hear the immigration case, Arizona says the administration's contention that states "are powerless to use their own resources to enforce federal immigration standards without the express blessing of the federal executive goes to the heart of our nation's system of dual sovereignty and cooperative federalism."

Reacting to the court's decision to hear the case, Republican Gov. Jan Brewer said, "This case is not just about Arizona. It's about every state grappling with the costs of illegal immigration."

Many other state and local governments have taken steps aimed at reducing the effects of illegal immigration, the state says.

The administration argued that the justices should have waited to see how other courts ruled on the challenges to other laws before getting involved. Still, following the court's announcement Monday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said, "We look forward to arguing our point of view in that case when the time comes."

Brewer signed the immigration measure, S.B. 1070, into law in April 2010. The administration sued in July to block the law from taking effect.

In April, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a federal judge's ruling halting enforcement of several provisions of the Arizona law. Among the blocked provisions: requiring all immigrants to obtain or carry immigration registration papers; making it a state criminal offense for an illegal immigrant to seek work or hold a job; and allowing police to arrest suspected illegal immigrants without a warrant.

In October, the federal appeals court in Atlanta blocked parts of the Alabama law that forced public schools to check the immigration status of students and allowed police to file criminal charges against people who are unable to prove their citizenship.

Lawsuits in South Carolina and Utah are not as far along.

FMLN Supports the Increase in Troops but Not the Bill to Send Them to Afghanistan

2011-12-08T12:32:00.000-08:00

    When the FMLN came into power they originally opposed the idea of a large Armed Forces. In fact, after the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992, the FMLN worked to reduce the number of Armed Forces. By the time that President Funes came into office, the number was down to 11,000 (El Faro). However, during his time in office Funes and his administration has passed three budget increases for the Ministry of Defense, which has allowed the number of Armed Forces to increase by 57%. At an additional $25 million a year, the Funes administration has allocated 6,300 seats in the armed forces so that it now totals roughly 17,000 soldiers. The increase is only expected to continue as the projected budget for the Ministry of Defense in 2012 is $144,000,000-a $29.4 million increase. The reason for the increase in the 2012 budget is that the Funes administration plans to hold a massive national recruitment aiming to recruit 5,000 at risk youth to send to "Citizen Education Centers" where they will be trained and receive a monthly stipend. When asked at what point will the government stop recruiting, the response was about 22,000, which will be double of what the Funes administration inherited and about 1,000 more than the National Civil Police.
    According to the former Minister of Defence David Munguia Payes, the reason for the increase in soldiers is to strengthen the National Civil Police in combating crime. The soldiers will be responsible for surveillance at penitentiaries and patrolling areas of high homicide rates throughout the country.
    Although the FMLN party is promoting military growth, they are not willing to support the decree to send more troops to Afghanistan. The previous decree expired in October of 2011 and the legislative body has developed a new one that will last until October of 2012. However, the FMLN party refuses to support it on grounds that "El Salvador has 'a moral obligation to the United Nations' because the international body helped El Salvador in the peace process" (El Mundo). The FMLN insists that Afghanistan is a country in conflict and by sending troops over they will be violating its sovereignty. The FMLN has always been opposed to infringing on another county's soveriengty, an example being Iraq (E.S. troops were stationed from 2003-2009). On the other hand, they are in favor of sending troops where there are signs of a peace process such as Haiti and Lebanon.
    Unfortunately for the FMLN, like with the Iraq situation, they were out voted. The WIN, PE, CN and ARENA parties voted in favor of the new decree that will send additional troops to Afghanistan until October 13 of 2012, totalling 43 votes against the 31 FMLN(La Prensa Grafica).
    The exact mission and number of soldiers to be sent will be determined by the Executive on a later date when he deems necessary.

President Funes Proposes Tax Reform

2011-12-06T11:44:00.000-08:00

    The tax reform proposed by President Funes that eliminates income tax for those with the lowest income, has entered the Legislative Assembly. This reform is said to eliminate income tax for those in the lowest tax bracket, keep it the same for those in the middle, and increase it for those in the upper tax bracket.
     At the press conference on Sunday, San Salvador's Archbishop Monsignor Escabar Alas spoke on behalf of the Catholic Church and their stance on this reform. According to him, the Catholic Church is in favor of this reform as long as it contributes to human development and "alleviate[s] the economic crisis among people with greater needs" (DiarioCoLatino).
     According to El Faro, the government's proposal will eliminate income taxes for about 260,000 of those in the low wage/ lower income tax bracket. Most Americans are probably thinking right now 'So who is going to pick up the slack?' Well that would be those in the highest tax bracket such as companies, corporations and individuals that have higher incomes. Many Americans would probably detest this approach because it is too similar to the Robin Hood theme of steal from the rich and give to the poor. However, the Salvadoran government does not view this as stealing from the rich, as the rich are already making an exorbitant amount of money that this increase will hardly make a dent in their overall income. The current taxation, on the other hand, is the difference between an additional meal per day or money towards a child's schooling for those in the lowest tax bracket. Therefore, by eliminating the income tax for those with the lowest income the government will be improving its economy by allowing more money to circulate through the markets and education sectors, which will in turn ensure macroeconomic stability by creating jobs and boosting growth. At least that is the idea promoted by those in support of this reform.
     In order for this reform to be passed 43 of the 84 deputies in the Legislative Assembly need to vote yes. If this reform is passed it will be the first change in the income tax collection since 1991 (El Faro). Unfortunately, it must be kept in mind that this reform is being introduced during an election period. Which means that many running for re-election will have to face difficult questions from the public regarding its effectiveness and when results can be expected (LaPrensaGrafica). If the public isn't on board, it is doubtful that Funez and the reform will acquire the 43 needed votes (especially considering the 84 deputies voting are most likely among those expected to receive the tax increase).

Spain Complies with Judge Vasquez and Agrees to Request for the Extradition of Military Officers Responsible for the Jesuit Murders

2011-12-02T09:03:00.000-08:00

      Three months later, after heavy consideration, Spain finally agrees to fulfill the request made by Judge Eloy Velasco of the Spanish National Court, to request the extradition of the fifteen Salvadoran military suspects in the Jesuit murder case. Spain will be requesting extradition of two from the United States as well as the remaining thirteen from El Salvador for murder, terrorism and crimes against humanity.
      The following are the names of those Spain is seeking to extradite from El Salvador: General Rafael Humberto Larios, former Minister of Defense, and Juan Rafael Bustillo, former commander of the Salvadoran Air Force, sergeants Antonio Ramiro Avalos Vargas and Tomas Castillo Oscar Mariano Amaya Zarpate, Colonel Juan Orlando Zepeda, Francisco Elena Fuentes, Guillermo Alfredo Benavides, Joaquin Arnoldo Cerna, Carlos Mauricio Guzman and Oscar Alberto León Linares, and the lieutenants José Ricardo Espinoza Guerra, Second Lieutenant Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos and Corporal Oscar Mariano Guzman. As well as the two being requested from the United States, Colonel Inocente Orlando Montano and Lieutenant Hector Ulises Cuenca.
        Those that are seeking justice and are in support of Judge Velasco, are hoping that these extradition requests will be respected and honored so as not to have a repeat of the Aug 7 trial when 9 previously arrested soldiers were set free due to a failure to request their extradition before issuing arrest warrants.

The Vulnerability of Latin America to Climate Change

2011-12-01T12:38:00.000-08:00

       The United Nation's Climate Change Conference began at the beginning of this week in Durban, South Africa. 190 nations will be in attendance. As a result of recent weather events representatives of Latin America are attending this conference in search of answers and in effort to persuade other nations to commit to changes that will decrease the vulnerability of Latin America to climate change.The majority of Latin American nations will be taking their positions together with China and other developing nations in joint force called Group 77.
       According to the Climate Risk Index released earlier this week, the countries that are most vulnerable to climate changes are: Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras, Pakistan, Russia . You will notice that three out of the five are Latin American because: "Latin America is highly vulnerable to extreme weather events. We've had masses of ice loss in the Andes that affect water availability for agriculture, (causes), severe storms and flooding in Central America and north-south droughts"(Brazilian coordinator of the World Wild Fund, Carlos). Slavadoran Minister of Environment Herman Rosa Chavez reports that El Salvador, along with the rest of Central America, has decided to take a joint position at the conference in order to gain true recognition of their vulnerability to climate change. Chavez points out that Latin America is one of the few areas left in the world that still has land and water available, and where food production can increase significantly. However, if nothing is done to counter climate change, by 2070 crops will decrease dramatically and areas like Brazil could lose up to 40% of their soybean production (El Mundo). Chavez also points out that Latin America (as has been said since the beginning of the climate change debate) is the home of the world's most significant oxygen producer and South America's water source-the Amazon. Which helps to combat and regulate climate change, and thus, is incentive for the rest of the world to protect Latin America from climate change.
     Group 77's main objective is to get the wealthier nations to renew their commitment to the Kyoto Protocol (expires in 2010) to reduce harmful emissions. In addition to this, they are seeking to enforce the Green Fund that was created in last year's conference in Cancun, to address the needs of those developing countries effected by climate change. "Those who got rich at the expense of sacrificing the global environment must now assume the responsibilities that fit," said Jose Arguello, Argentine negotiator of the G77.
      One of the largest emitters of harmful gases of the Latin American nations is not surprisingly, Brazil, who is choosing to group itself with other more developed developing nations like China, India, and South Africa.
      Another group outside of G77, consisting of other Latin American nations is Los ALBA. Los ALBA is a more ambitious group when it comes to propositions of climate change solutions, and is comprised of the following nations: Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

In addition to attending this conference and persuading other nations to act on the climate change issue, El Salvador itself is working towards change. This morning a forum was held by the National Energy Council and the National Center for Agricultural Technology in order to suggest and analyse the region's experience with and development of biofuels(DiarioCoLatino). This is a very sensitive topic, especially to Latin Americans, who view bio fuel as a waste of agriculture that should be used as a food source. With that in mind, Rene Magana the Executive Director of the Center, stressed that this development of biofuel will be done with environment and food security in mind. So far the advances of biofuel in Latin America are by no means great. However, a bill is currently being considered which will provide the legal support that is needed for the introduction of a new energy source.

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

2011-11-30T11:48:00.000-08:00

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.

Nature vs. El Salvador

2011-11-28T10:59:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2011-11-24T21:50:00.000-08:00

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

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

2011-11-22T11:58:00.000-08:00

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.

SOA Watch's Vigil Leads to Only One Arrest

2011-11-21T12:51:00.000-08:00

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

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

2011-11-18T09:40:00.000-08:00

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.

2010 Vigil video

Salvadoran Secondary Schooling in a State of Decline

2011-11-16T10:53:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2011-11-15T08:24:00.000-08:00

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.

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

2011-11-11T12:40:00.000-08:00

According to an interview by DiarioCoLatino with Gerson Martinez, Minister of Public Works, as of November 5^th 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”.

In the New Gangland of El Salvador

2011-11-09T08:45:00.000-08:00

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

November 10, 2011

Alma Guillermoprieto

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. ↩

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

2011-11-08T11:25:00.000-08:00

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:

“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).
“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).
“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).
“The projected operational life of Pacific Rim’s Cabañas mine is just six years” (2).
“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?

E.S. and U.S. Sign "Partners for Growth" Agreement

2011-11-03T13:31:00.000-07:00

The governments of El Salvador and the United States signed the agreement for the program “Partners for Growth” this afternoon. The representative that signed for El Salvador was Technical Secretary of the President, Alex Segovia. And the U.S. representative was Assistant Secretary of State of Economic, Energy and Business in the

U.S.

, Jose Fernandez. The signing took place at the Presidential House in El Salvador which President Funez honored by witnessing.

According to El Mundo the “Partners for Growth” program is:

“an ambitious set of actions to increase economic growth in El Salvador, focusing commitments between both countries, through a Joint Action Plan. It's a new way to carry out programs of assistance, both for the United States to El Salvador, and is part of the management policy of Barack Obama for Development. It is an initiative focused on only one sector, but built a comprehensive proposal to accelerate and sustain economic growth in the long run by a group of selected countries.”

The initiative for this program was announced by President Barack Obama at a press conference during his visit to El Salvador in March.

President Funez believes that this will lay down a foundation for the process of sustained development which will exploit the nation’s labor and production capacity through investments in infrastructure, and technology services and transfers. Segovia states that the program will be able to do this because it involves more than just monetary support; it is a “shared responsibility” in decision making to achieve development. In fact, this agreement allows the United States to have more of a hands on role and become active in decision and policy making rather, as opposed to its previous role as a “passive donor”(El Mundo). Part of this shared responsibility will include the U.S. partaking in the creation of policies designed to “overcome identified barriers that hinder growth: the insecurity and crime, low productivity, and others.” In, fact the

U.S.

has already recommended actions that should be taken to improve the conditions for economic growth, such as: approving the Concession Act of Port of the Union and the Financial System Law for the Promotion of Development.

By signing this agreement, El Salvador has become one of only four nations, and the only American nation, to implement the U.S. sustainable development initiative. The other three nations are Ghana, Tanzania and the Philippines.

Although sustainable development is a good idea and is needed in El Salvador, this pact makes me personally, a little skeptical. I’m not being Anti-American when I say this, but what is to say this isn’t another way for the U.S. to expand its control? The fact that this pact’s decisions will be “driven by the U.S” makes me wonder if this will in fact create economic growth, or will it cause an even lager dependency issue between the U.S. and El Salvador? And if it does lead to economic growth, what sacrifices will the Salvadorans have to endure, that the U.S. deems necessary for economic growth? Will this mean building more highways through the heart of villages against the villagers will, in order to ‘improve trade’ and product delivery? Like I said, I am not trying to be Anti-American or anti-growth. I guess my visit to El Salvador has allowed me to see things from a different angle I have come to realize that pacts such as this, that seem to be good intentioned from the American point of view, may not be what the people on the other end of the agreement really want or need, and may in fact cause more harm than good. My hope is of course, that the Salvadorans are able to maintain their sovereignty and use this pact to benefit their economy in ways that they agree with.

Damage Report from President Funes

2011-11-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

El Faro reports that on Monday President Funes released a statement concerning the damages caused by the E-12 storm. Funes stated that the initial estimate of $650 million worth of damages is too low. He now believes that the total cost in damages cannot be counted until all refugees return home. However, he believes the cost to be closer to $840 million. He breaks this down to :

$300 million worth of damage in the productive sector
$260.58 million worth of damage in the infrastructure
$207.8 million worth of damages to homes, schools and health centers
$70 million worth of damages to the environment

Before the storm, El Salvador's GDP was expected to grow by 2.1% and have record sales in grains, but now it is only expected to grow by 1.4% -if that.

President Funes, along with other Central American officials, is waiting to hear from the advisory board established by last Tuesday's meeting with the Central American Integration System, and has not yet released a statement regarding plans of reconstruction.

How can I help?

2011-10-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

To find out ways you can help the relief effort in El Salvador visit Tim's El Salvador Blog below. He provides a list of organizations helping in the recovery effort and also provides tips on how to help in times of crisis.
How can I help?

An official recovery/reconstruction strategy has not been released yet, but as soon as it is I will post to let you know.

Recovery and Reconstruction Discussion

2011-10-27T13:16:00.000-07:00

The recovery process has begun in El Salvador. This past Tuesday Central American Presidents belonging to the Central American Integration System met to asses the damage caused by the E-12 storm and begin strategizing a reconstruction plan. A plan has not been decided upon yet. However, several key areas have become the focus of the discussion such as the economic sector, infrastructure and the health sector.

In regards to the economic sector, the FMLN party has suggested that a legislative decree be made placing a ceiling on the price of grain, beans, rice, sugar and millet. Orestes Ortez, FMLN deputy, explains that this decree would only be in place for six months unless extended, and that it will help maintain stability until the true impact of the storm can be realized. Roberto d’Abuisson, ARENA congressman, disagrees stating that this sort of limitation will be counterproductive and only encourage shortages and hoarding. He explains that by placing a price ceiling on these goods the farmers will have no incentive to continue producing these goods, thus creating a shortage. This new law proposed by the FMLN has the consumers in mind as the benefactors rather than the producers, which is the main concern of those that oppose such as d’Abuisson.

Another area that is key to the reconstruction discussion is that of the infrastructure sector. One of the initial points made by President Funes at the meeting on Tuesday was that the solution to the recovery process is not simply to obtain resources from the international community to reconstruct the infrastructure of the past. Instead, Funes urges the international community, particularly industrialized nations, to reduce their production of greenhouse gases and recognize that Central America is vulnerable to the climate changes caused by these gases. In addition to this, Funes states that the reconstruction process needs to be adjusted to include new plans for infrastructure that can endure future storms. The government intends to use the $50 million credit approved by the Inter-American Development Bank to fund the reconstruction process.

In addition to the general infrastructure, the Health sector has also been an area of concern in the recovery discussion. It has been reported by Diario Co Latino that 247 Health centers have been affected by this storm, and will require 20 billion dollars for recovery. Of the 247, there are 39 hospitals and 3 centers that cannot be used at all. According to El Mundo, the Ministry of Finance plans to redirect $13 million in credit approved for reconstruction to the rebuild health units. Six million dollars has already been used towards humanitarian assistance. However, with diseases continuing to spread from contaminated water, health centers have become a priority.

The issue of contaminated water is also on the table for discussion. La Prensa Grafica reports that 8,353 water wells have been destroyed and 1,833 are flooded and contaminated. Also, according to the Ministry of Health 6,689 latrines have been flooded and 22,173 have been destroyed. This is a health concern because the consumption of contaminated water and crops can cause gastrointestinal illness. The clean up process of an individual well ranges from $250-$750, which many farmers cannot afford. The total cost to clean the damaged wells would be about $6,000,000 and $17.5 million more to clean latrines, as opposed to an additional $1.2 million to completely replace 500 wells.

The discussion continues in El Salvador as leaders weigh their options and attempt to get their financial houses in order. More updates as the strategy for reconstruction is decided.

Total Damage from E-12 Storm in E.S.

2011-10-26T10:56:00.000-07:00

Almost one week has passed since the E-12 officially ended in El Salvador. Now that the torrential rains have stopped, the Civil Protection along with government officials, have begun to asses the damage and construct a recovery plan.

According to El Faro, the recorded number of displaced refugees has reached 52,000 the majority staying in one of 566 shelters, and the death count remains the same at 32. As a result of this, all classes are suspended throughout

El Salvador

because many of the shelters are located in public school facilities.

In addition to this, the main highway to the west of the country from San Salvador has been closed due to landslides. Other smaller roads have been closed, as well as 15 bridges damaged and 5 completely destroyed from currents.

La Prensa Grafica reports that the UN has requested that 15.7 million be raised between October 2011 and April of 2012 to assist the 300,000 Salvadorans that have been affected. The UN has also expressed concern for the health of Salvadorans, as 69% of the population has been affected and water related diseases are spreading.

Another area that has suffered greatly from this storm is the Agricultural/ Economic sector.

The Ministry of Agriculture has released its statistical records of the damage (El Mundo):

35% of domestically produced grains have been destroyed
7 million bushels have been affected, 1.6 million of which are non-recoverable

987,890 bushels of corn, 134,267 apples, 339,835 bushels of beans lost
21,352 cattle lost
35,570 poultry lost
4,279 hives spoiled
265 acres of fish ponds affected (26% of total production)
29% of fruit production affected (mainly bananas and papayas)
6.111 acres of sugar cane damaged (expected to lower production by 20%)

The direct damage is estimated to be 650 million dollars. However, once indirect costs are included the total economic damage raises to slightly over 1 billion dollars. According to El Faro, this is more than double the damage caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998: “That hurricane left 260 million in losses for over a decade was considered the most damaging natural phenomenon. He left 240 dead and the maximum level of accumulated rainfall was 860 millimeters.” This maximum rain recorded from this E-12 storm was 1513mm in Huizucar Station, La Libertad.

More on plans for recovery and the recovery process soon to come.

The State of Emergency Continues in E.S. with the Refugee Count Now Over 32,000

2011-10-19T12:03:00.000-07:00

It has been ten days since the torrential rains began in El Salvador. The death toll has unfortunately increased from four to thirty two over weekend, as the rains continue to fall effecting more than 150,000 people. On the bright side, the weather station delivered the only good news in the past ten days. A cold front from the north is expected to move in tonight (Wednesday night), bringing with it some dry air to weaken the rains by Thursday.

The number of refugees now totals over 32,000, with 21,500 staying in the 232 shelters across the country, and the remaining 10,500 staying with friends and family. The Civil Protection reports that the problem is now evolving from emergency rescue to caring for those that have lost everything (houses, possessions, crops and animals, and means of production) in the floods and landslides. Close to 20,000 houses have been damaged or destroyed over the past ten days, leaving many with the daunting task of rebuilding their lives. In response to this, the national Legislature has declared a state of public calamity, which will allow for resources to be redistributed to the rebuilding process. This declaration is also intended to compel citizens to volunteer without promise of “just compensation”.

Although preventative actions were taken to keep the death toll low, it none the less climbed to 32 over the weekend. This is in large part due to those areas where evacuation was “advised” by mayors but not enforced. In many areas, such as the municipality of Mejicanos, people refuse to leave their homes. In fact a team of 100 was sent in to try and persuade the 4,000 residents to evacuate, but were only able to convince 500. This reluctant attitude is also shared by local officials. Some mayors have scheduled an evacuation operation but canceled it due to “excessive risk to municipal staff”. Others have even gone so far to say that demanding their community to evacuate would be crazy, and that they will take their own appropriate punitive measures. It is this reluctance that caused the climb in deaths over the weekend as several slopes and dams collapsed.

The amount of rain that has fallen over the past 10 days is phenomenal. The historical record for rainfall of any country during a storm was 861 mm, which was the record set by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. To put this in perspective, the average annual rainfall for El Salvador lies between 1.400-2.00 mm. The total rainfall from the past ten days has more than marginally surpassed this record, and has come close to surmounting the annual amount at over 1.20 mm.

Needless to say the Salvadorans are in need of any and all support. So please, keep them in your thoughts in prayers as they work to recover and rebuild.

A Few last words from Dean Brackley, S.J.

2011-10-19T08:46:00.000-07:00

I invite you to discover your vocation in downward mobility. It's a scary request... The world is obsessed with wealth and security and upward mobility and prestige. But let us teach solidarity, walking with the victim,s, serving and loving. I offer this for you to consider - downward mobility. And I would say in this enterprise there is a great deal of hope.

Have the courage to... lose control.

Have the courage to feel useless.

Have the courage to listen.

Have the courage to receive.

Have the courage to let your heart be broken.

Have the courage to feel.

Have the courage to fall in love.

Have the courage to get ruined for life.

Have the courage to make a friend.

Dean Brackley, S.J.

the following is a link to an audio testimony of gratitude from Dean Brackley, S.J.(in spanish):

Testimony of gratitude from Dean Brackley, S.J.

Fr. Dean Brackley, S.J. Dies

2011-10-17T08:35:00.000-07:00

From our friend, Gene Palumbo:

    In August, I wrote to you all saying, "This is the email I was hoping I'd never have to send." That was when Dean - having gotten the scan results that showed the tumor continuing to grow, despite the chemotherapy - decided to forego further treatment and return to El Salvador for palliative care.

   Now, sadly, I write to you again, and again could begin with those same words.

   I sent an update yesterday morning to tell you that Dean had left the hospital. Then I went over to see him. He had said he wanted to be in touch with his two brothers and his sister. I called each of them from my cell phone and held the phone to his ear. he could hear them but, given his weakened state, was able to say very little to them.

   This morning Father Jose Maria "Chema" Tojeira called to say that Dean had grown much weaker. My wife, Guadalupe, and I went to see him immediately. When we got to this room, we found him surrounded by brother Jesuits -- Chema, Jon Sobrino, Rafael de Sivatte, Mauricio Gaborit and Vincinte Espinoza - and his doctor, Miny Romero. We took turns sitting beside him, holding his hand and whispering in his ear. His breathing continued to slow, and shortly after 11 a.m., he died.

   As you know, Dean came to El Salvador to help replace the six Jesuits murdered in 1989. Today, his life as a Jesuit ended in the place where their lives as Jesuits began: the Santa Tecla residence, where they did their two-year novitiate.

   One of my tasks, in my role as Dean's "secretary" in these last months, was to check his email. I don't know why, but it occurred to me to check it again before sending you this note. I'm so glad I did that, because I found something that had just arrived: a note from Rafael de Sivatte. He's another of the six Jesuits who came here to take the places of their murdered brothers. He, too, has been keeping a list of people abreast of how Dean has been doing. he copied Dean on those emails, and so it was that this turned up in Dean's inbox just now:

           I write to give you the painful and joyful news that God, Father and Mother, has taken to his side our brother, friend, father, and companion in solidarity, Dean. I can tell you that he died so peacefully that those of us who were with him at that moment felt filled with peace ourselves. I send you a fraternal embrace, united with you in prayers and in the commitment to the Kingdom for which he worked and continues to work.

   I loved that Rafael wrote on the subject line of his email: "Dean, still with us."

Peace,

Gene

We will miss your company, but you will always be with us. Thank you for your example of solidarity. Fr. Dean Brackley, S.J. Presente!

Tropical Storms wreak havoc on El Salvador

2011-10-14T10:58:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of this week a tropical storm hit El Salvador. The rain has been relentless and is not expected to stop until Saturday, with another tropical depression following soon after. To many of us in the U.S. a tropical storm usually isn't cause for panic or a state of emergency. A hurricane yes, but tropical storms..usually not. However, in El Salvador tropical storms bring torrential amounts of rain which have led to a total of 246 landslides, 46 floods, and more than 40 overflowing rivers. This has led the National Civil Protection Commission to declare a state of emergency. Eight departments (equivalent to states) are still in a state of emergency and have ordered an evacuation. Due to the fact that neither the highland mountain areas nor the coastlines are safe, over 4,000 people have been evacuated from their homes to a total of 77 shelters dispersed throughout the various safety zones.
The red cross and other organizations associated with the NCPC have been traveling through the affected departments via boat to rescue those that have been trapped by the flooding or landslides. In addition to providing transportation these search and rescue teams are also providing food and water to those that choose to stay behind because the storm has contaminated many of their water and food sources.
So far only four deaths and one missing person have been recorded as a result of the storm in El Salvador. Unfortunately, with another depression approaching the NCPC does not consider this the end. In fact, the NCPC has requested that the current emergency budget be re-evaluated in order to address the current needs. The NCPC estimates that a total of $837,000,558.66 will be needed for supplies, damages and repairs.

Romero's Shooter Identified

2011-10-07T11:00:00.000-07:00

My apologies for not writing about this sooner.

It appears that the shooter of Monseñor Romero has been identified. Salvadoran newspaper Diario Co Latino reported at the beginning of September that a reliable source informed them that the shooter was former Deputy Sergeant of the National Guard Samoyoa Marino. At the time of the shooting Marino was one of two good shooters/snipers in El Salvador. It is believed that Marino was suggested to (now former) President Molina by Molina's son for the mission. The following is an alleged conversation between Marino and Captain Eduardo Ávila planning the shooting (loosely translated):

"This is the opportunity," said Avila, thereupon asked for the shooter. "Do not worry," he said Molina, "I'm going to get him."

The newspaper's source also claims that the weapon used in the shooting verifies Molina as the shooter: "the rifle with telescopic sights, high accuracy rating. Swiss 219 (ie, size 22), was the property of Avila, and which had been tested on different days at Finca San Luis, Santa Tecla. The shooter was familiar with such weapons, because he was a specialist or hobby shooter."

The whereabouts of Marino are currently unknown. However, his birthday is said to be October 8, 1949 so he will be 63 tomorrow if he is still alive. (No I did realize I would be writing about him so near his birhday).

For more on the connection of Marino to the killing, his photograph, and on how the killing was planned, go to :

http://www.diariocolatino.com/es/20110909/portada/96347/El-francotirador-que-dispar%C3%B3-contra-Monse%C3%B1or-Romero-fue-un-ex-Guardia-Nacional.htm?tpl=69

*It is in spanish so you may need a translator of some sort*

Crime and Fatigue

2011-10-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

A final blog from Chris' experience...

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Crime and Fatigue

Awareness of crime – especially violent crime – is pervasive in El Salvador, a country with one of the highest homicide rates in the world. Houses are surrounded by walls topped with razor wire. Armed (which is not necessarily the same thing as “trained”) guards stand outside banks, jewelry stores, even ice cream shops, and security is big business. A people that clearly prizes hospitality as a virtue (more on that in a later post) seems also hesitant to open doors. When in a car, we drove with doors locked and windows up.

When I visited in July, the newspaper reported that the Department of Sonsonate with a population of about a half million people, had already endured 300 homicides for the year. While I was not directly affected personally, my visit to Chalatenango was complicated by violence. Apparently a refusal (or inability?) to pay extortion fees to organized crime led to two workers on that bus route being assassinated. The drivers’ perceived reluctance on the part of authorities to protect them adequately, which led to a bus drivers’ strike that lasted a few days. I was fortunate that Crispaz was able to arrange for a driver to get me there and back; most people do not have that luxury.

The US State Department calls public transportation “risky and not recommended.” On the other hand, buses, though hardly comfortable, are frequent, convenient, and inexpensive – within San Salvador, fares are 20 cents. Tens of thousands of people ride the buses daily, the vast majority without incident. I first took some bus rides with Salvadorans, then alone – and also without incident -- but always to friendly warnings that I should keep my pack on my lap, be home by dark, and, if mugged, just cooperate. Standard advice, I suppose.

A dirt road up the gorgeous volcano of San Salvador rises up out San Ramon, through the community of Las Nubes – still without safe drinking water in 2011 – and high above the capital. I mentioned in passing that, if time permitted, I would love to walk to the top. Several people – both Salvadorans and North American expatriates alike – told me that it would not be safe, and the likelihood of being mugged, even up there, would be very high. My friend Gustavo eventually offered to take me up with a group, but more out of generosity than because he thought it was a good idea. So, we never did go all the way up.

Maria Teresa, Sarai, Gustavo, Hector, and Sylvia took me part way up the volcano.

All of this kept me wondering just how cautious I should be. Was I too worried? Not worried enough? I certainly did not feel worried on the 20-minute daytime bus trips to San Ramon. On the other hand, when my poor sense of direction left a couple of women who had escorted me taking the bus home after dark, I was desperately nervous until I got their call that they had arrived home safely.

I started to think that maybe my worry had been overblown, that I had listened to the warnings too attentively. I thought with some shame of my undergraduate days in New Orleans. As a freshman, I had been warned not to take the bus downtown, but to stick to the streetcar – which, by the way, is considerably slower. I followed that advice for three years before I was willing to brave being the only white person on the bus downtown. I was self-conscious and nervous. You can bet that I kept my pack on my lap, planned to be home before dark, and was prepared to cooperate with any muggers. Nobody on the bus, however, seemed to have any reaction to my presence whatsoever. I felt stupid, alarmist, and racist.

On the other hand, the risks about which I had been warned are all too real in El Salvador. The fact that Salvadorans face them daily does not make them less dangerous, just common. I had the chance to put this dilemma to Brian Rude, a Lutheran minister from Canada who has been working in Salvadoran prison ministry for years. He related that he has been mugged a number of times, and his apartment robbed on other occasions. He addresses the situation by having a policy of never carrying with him anything he is not willing to give up. I thought of St. Francis of Assisi, who justified his order’s vow of corporate poverty on the grounds that if they owned property, they might feel the urge to defend it, and therefore to harm those who were trying to take it.

So, there is legitimate reason to feel concerned about security in El Salvador. It also must be, I would imagine, really exhausting to maintain that level of vigilance over the long haul. The long-term effects of this vigilance cannot be good for the psychological health of individuals or of society as a whole.

-Chris Welch '11

Swatting Flies

2011-09-30T07:21:00.000-07:00

Another entry from Chris' experience...

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Swatting Flies

Early on in my stay in El Salvador, I was fumbling my way through the daily newspaper. I came across a startling headline that placed the Salvadoran unemployment rate somewhere in the seven percent range. The old saw still holds true. There are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics. While there a small number of Salvadorans are without any work, a large number are dramatically underemployed, so the seven percent rate is misleading. Official employment numbers include work in both the formal and informal sectors of the economy, and it is in the informal sector – which accounts for something like half of all non-agriculural employment in El Salvador – that so many people can be categorized as “underemployed.”

The informal sector is broad, and includes street vendors of all types. Young men hop on and off buses selling gum and candy, or canvas cars at stoplights with any number of wares. One item being heavily “marketed” when I was there, I noticed, was the battery-powered flyswatter. The zapping power of those big old purple bug-killing lamps folks in the US used to hang in their back yards during the summer, but in the shape of a small tennis racquet.

For my first couple of days in El Salvador, before heading out to the community of San Ramon for two weeks, I had the opportunity to tag along with a delegation from Cincinnati (including the Executive Director of Crispaz, Dennis O’Connor) as they visited a few of the country’s significant organizations and cultural sites. One of these visits was with Comadres, La Comite de Madres, Mons. Romero. The organization was founded in 1977 as a means of uniting the relatives of people who had been “disappeared” amidst government repression. The women there spoke for hours about the traumatic events that led to their own involvement in the group. One woman recounted the details of her search for her daughter – whose corpse she eventually found – as if had all happened in the past week, not in 1979. Without melodrama, she frankly admitted that she did not believe that she would EVER get over the pain of those events, but that she knew she had to share them nonetheless. That was a motif that shot through my entire visit, in fact. The enduring legacy of trauma for so many people has not been wiped away by a couple of decades of (comparatively speaking) peace and stability.

We all sweltered in the humid July afternoon air. The heaviness of the air, though, was nothing compared to that of the reality being recounted. Amid the intensity of the long afternoon, Alexis, the delegation leader from Crispaz who translated the proceedings, asked to take a break. If we thought that the hiatus would provide much respite, though, we were wrong. It simply gave us the opportunity to view some of the hundreds of graphic photos of murdered, often mutilated, victims of the repression that Comadres had managed to collect.

As we ground through a fascinating, exhausting, perhaps disheartening afternoon, someone would occasionally pick up the bug zapper and swat at a fly. In most instances, I would hardly have noticed such an action at all, but on this day it seemed filled with importance, however unintentional. It gave ME a tiny jolt, too. Juxtaposed with a picture of a power structure that had systematically engaged in the wanton killing of thousands of people, the casual swat at a couple of flies became for me a startling symbol of what happens when we slip into thinking of others not as human persons but as pests.

-Chris Welch SIPPIE '11

A Short Introduction to a Month in El Salvador

2011-09-29T11:40:00.000-07:00

The following is one of multiple blogs written by former SIPPIE Chris Welch during his time in El Salvador this summer.

Saturday, September 17, 2011

A Short Introduction to a Month in El Salvador

In March of 2011, I made my first-ever visit to El Salvador as a member of a Crispaz delegation from the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry. In fact, it was my first trip to Latin America at all. We visited significant sites and met with people and organizations doing the kind of work that interests Crispaz – Christians for Peace in El Salvador.

Crispaz emphasizes the concept of “reverse mission.” A delegation trip is less about doing some kind of social service or missionary work than it is about meeting people and being moved by their realities. The hope, then, is that delegation trip members, on their return home, will look for ways to teach others about the Salvadoran reality and engage in activities that allow them to accompany the Salvadoran people.

After my delegation trip, I, like the rest of my group, spent some time thinking and praying about what a next step for me would be. How could I take this experience and let it affect my daily life as a schoolteacher, student, and person? In fact, I was at the Easter Vigil Mass about six weeks later when I experienced a strong urge to ask Crispaz about returning to El Salvador for a longer trip. (I think Ignatius probably would have called it an experience of “consolation without previous cause.”) Having had such a positive experience with Crispaz for a one-week delegation trip, I decided to ask them about their Summer Immersion Program.

When I got in touch with Dennis, the executive director of Crispaz at their office in Cincinnati, I laid out some of my practical obstacles to doing this: my Spanish is poor for one, and I was going to have to take a summer class that would only leave me 4 weeks for the visit. The Summer Immersion Program is generally designed more for a seven or eight week stay. Dennis reassured me on both counts – I had enough Spanish to get by, and four weeks was long enough to have a meaningful experience accompanying the Salvadoran people.

Crispaz set to work organizing people for me to accompany, and I prepared by starting to watch soccer (futbol) on the Spanish channel. It did not help. I only learned how to say “foul,” “corner kick,” and “Gooooooooooooool!” In any case, I did arrive in San Salvador in late July and stayed for four weeks. Herein I’d like, somewhat belatedly, to reflect on some of that experience.

-Chris Welch SIPPIE '11

Update: further development in the Jesuit case

2011-09-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

    After the decision of the August ruling was made in favor of the 9 former soldiers due to legal technicalities, many followers of the case began to doubt if any progress could be made in favor of the murdered Jesuits. Will justice be served? Or will this case fall victim to the various loop holes in the Salvadoran legal system, and end in an impasse?

   On September 22, 2011, INTERPOL issued 5 new red notices to the Salvadoran government for a different group of former soldiers. Unlike the red notices for the previous 9, the Central Criminal Courts of Madrid took preemptive action and declared that these red notices are for the sole purpose of extradition and not simply for locating and tracking the accused. The first set of red notices lacked this sort of clarity, which proved to be a technicality that worked in favor of the first nine.
    The five former soldiers being requested are: Guillermo Alfredo Benavides, Joaquin Arnoldo Cerna Flores, Hector Ulises Cuenca Ocampo, Carlos Mauricio Guzman Aguila and Oscar Alberto. Of these five Guillermo Benavides, former director of the Military School, was previously found guilty of murder in 1991, but was later protected by the amnesty law and left unpunished (Elfaro). Also, Hector Ocampo-former deputy minister of Public Safety, is reported to have applied for temporary protected status and is currently residing in the United States. However, the U.S. government denies having granted residency to persons accused of war crimes and claims they are monitoring the case and will be willing to "give any Spanish request for assistance the appropriate consideration" (dwkcommentaries).

    In order to avoid a repeat scenario, INTERPOL filed official extradition requests and must now wait for the Salvadoran Supreme Court to approve the request for extradition before they can make legal arrests and proceed with further hearings and prosecutions. Although the likeliness for the Supreme Court to grant extradition is slim, based on their decision of the previous 9 and their lack of action regarding military injustices of the civil war, it is not entirely certain what the Supreme Court will rule.

For more information regarding the case and how it has developed check out : http://dwkcommentaries.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/international-criminal-justice-developments-in-spanish-courts-case-regarding-the-salvadoran-murders-of-the-jesuit-priests/

Bridging the gap to become a better democracy: The future of absentee votes in El Salvador

2011-09-23T12:49:00.000-07:00

Two major issues that the people of

El Salvador

have been faced with over the past few decades are voting and emigration. The reasons that voting and emigration have become such sore spots for Salvadorans vary, but the bottom line under all of the various explanations is corruption.-Yes, it is true that even the greatest democracies are guilty of some degree of corruption.- However, El Salvador's "dirty past" has caused two major problems that the present government must now work to eliminate if it wishes to become a truly democratic nation.

    The current issue with voting in El Salvador is the lack of voter participation. This stems from a history of pressure put on voters to vote for a particular party, in addition to regularly tampered ballot boxes, etc. After realizing that their votes were not effecting the results of the elections, and tiring of the relentless threats being placed on their lives and jobs, many Salvadorans saw voting as a futile effort. This inability to change their circumstances (whether economical, political, social or all of the above) left many with only one logical option-emigration.

     Emigration from El Salvador has grown tremendously over the past decade and is still on the rise. In fact, "More than 2 million Salvadorans live outside the country, primarily in the US. Another way of looking at this -- of every person alive today who was born in El Salvador, 1 out of every 4 lives outside of the country" (Tim's El Salvador Blog). Having a fourth of its population live outside of its border's does not go unnoticed by the government. In the past the government simply accepted emigration because of how beneficial remittances were, and still are, to the economy. According to Americas Quarterly : "In the first eight months of 2011, Salvadorans living abroad sent home $2.4 billion in remittances to friends and families in El Salvador—a 4.8 percent increase over the same period in 2010. This makes the overseas community a vital part of the national economy."

   The current Salvadoran government has come to realize the importance of its citizens that live abroad. In fact President Mauricio Funes has mentioned multiple times in the past of his interest in absentee voting:
  "I have asked the political parties, the intellectuals, academicians and magistrates, to prepare the bases of a political national consensus that pushes the necessary reforms to expand and to strengthen democracy, transparent the life of the political parties and to improve the performance of the electoral national justice, as well as, and this is an essential point of my request, that guarantee the right to vote of our sisters and brothers abroad"(El Reportero).
Unfortunately, up until now Funes' attempts to restore the voting rights to those abroad have not been fruitful. However, last week at a celebration of the nation's independence, Funes reiterated the importance of absentee voting. He declared that the government is currently working with the United Nations on the technicalities of absentee voting in order to ensure that that option will be available to Salvadorans for the next election in 2014.

      Funes concludes that: "No matter how mature our institutions and as much as we modernize our rule of law, we are not a true democracy as one third of our population lives outside the decision-making, in truth, this is an achievement of great significance. A priority indispensable and necessary condition for the consolidation of the united country we all want."

     By establishing an absentee voting system, Funes hopes to reunite Salvadorans with their country by allowing them to have an impact on their country's future. Although the new Salvadoran government has not eradicated the need to emigrate, it has realized the need for change, and is at least making efforts to increase voter participation and improve its democratic system.

New addition to the Crispaz family

2011-09-13T11:47:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone!
My name is Jessica, and I am a recent addition to the Crispaz family. I will be working in the Cincinnati office as a Long Term Volunteer, contributing to the new media aspect of the organization. Since you will be hearing a lot from me in the future, I figured I should provide you with a little background info about me so that you are more familiar with the person/voice behind the blogs. So here goes...
I am a badger. And by that I mean that I'm an alumni of Spring Hill College (Mobile, AL). I recently graduated from there in May with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English and Political Science.
So why is this important?
I mention this because Spring Hill is what brought me to be a part of Crispaz. Every year Spring Hill provides students the opportunity to take part in an immersion trip, providing various locations in Central America to choose from, each offering a different type of experience. To be brief, I chose, and then was approved for the El Salvador trip, hosted by Crispaz. On the trip our delegation was immersed in the Salvadoran culture, where we were given the opportunity to meet with government officials, selected leaders of the community,and various organizations that work with Crispaz to learn about El Salvador's past and current state of affairs, in addition to this we were able to stay in a remote village with very hospitable host families. My experience on this trip is enough to take up its own blog-which is a possibility! However, I will keep it brief for the purpose of this blog. This was an INTENSE experience.
Ok so what?
Well it was this intensity, the intensity of El Salvador's past, the intensity in every Salvadoran's story, the intensity of the ambiguous, current state of affairs that made an impact on me. As common to many Americans, I have the "do" mindset. The mindset where you feel the need to constantly do. If there is a problem you must DO something about it. If you need or want something you must DO something to get it. Well on this trip we learned that you can't always just fly in with and answer and DO something to solve the problem. I know from experience that this is a misconceived notion that many Americans have. Because we are privileged to knowledge and money, we have to power to "make a difference". Unfortunately, this well intentioned notion has caused more of a problem than a solution in many developing nations. Including El Salvador. This problem is known as the dependency theory, where a 'periphery' of poor, under-developed states become dependent on the wealth and resources of the 'core' developed states. This theory is usually thought of as applicable to governments and the 'business end' of the economy only and not to good intentioned charity organizations. Unfortunately, the charity provided by many organizations, whether it is money, medical supplies or food etc., often creates an issue of dependency as well.
Which is what attracted me to Crispaz. It is not your typical charity organization that is always "doing" something to make a difference and unintentionally creating a relationship of dependence between the people and the organization. Rather, it is more of a facilitator that works with the Salvadoran people and encourages them to take matters into their own hands by providing connections and support through mutuality.
At first I believed that this was like the parable: give a man to fish and he eats for a day, teach him to fish and he eats for a lifetime. Until I realized that the philosophy of Crispaz is a slight step above that.What I mean by this is Crispaz doesn't create a teacher-student scenario (which is initially helpful, but ultimately creates a relationship of dependency) but instead, provides a scenario more like a mentoring friend. This type of relationship allows Crispaz to work along side the people to advise, listen and help when requested and to also, step aside and let the people of El Salvador ultimately "run the show".
With that being said, even though I admire the not so hands on approach, I still was raised in the "do" mentality and cannot completely let that go. Which I think many of the people we spoke with in El Salvador realized, because at the end of our discussions they all asked us to "do" one thing- share their story.
By becoming a LTV with Crispaz, I hope to do what was asked of me, to share their story and bring more people to learn and understand what is happening in El Salvador.

So now, hopefully you will know a little bit more about the person behind the blogs.
Until the next one, God Bless =)

New developments with Spanish courts and Jesuits

2011-09-06T07:30:00.000-07:00

(We share this note from Terry Karl, a professor at Stanford University...)
Dear Friends,
(and please excuse me for being unable to answer so many emails in the last months)
This is to update you on an historic development in the Jesuits Massacre Case, which I have been working on for many years as the expert witness. The murder of six Jesuit priests, their cook and her young daughter, which occurred in November 1989, was the catalyst ending U.S. aid as well as the civil war in that country. The priests were among the leading intellectuals in Central America and included the rector and vice rector of the region's leading university. Three of them had been offered visiting professorships at Stanford University shortly before their murders.
As you may have already read in the NYT or Washington Post (for those of in the US) or the BBC or Guardian (in Europe), nine of the twenty named defendants in the case - all former Salvadoran military officials -- made a decision to self-surrender to Salvadoran military authorities late Sunday night when faced with Interpol arrests. While the facts are still unfolding, I wanted to provide you with an update.
A Spanish Judge, Eloy Velasco, issued indictments against twenty of the defendants, all former members of the Salvadoran military charging them with crimes against humanity and state terrorism for their role in this massacre. The case is taking place in Spain because several of the priests were Spanish citizens and, after a sham trial, El Salvador's ARENA Party passed an amnesty law, which has been ruled illegal by the Inter-American Court and is not recognized outside El Salvador. The judge issued arrest warrants last month for 14 of the defendants, which Interpol began to send throughout their system.
This week, when it became clear that the Salvadoran National Police were going to honor the arrest warrants (an historic first), nine of the defendants met on Sunday night (August 7) at a country club outside of San Salvador to presumably discuss next steps. Later that night, at approximately 10:00 p.m., all nine turned themselves into a military facility also outside of San Salvador. The decision to self-surrender to the military was most likely an attempt to circumvent the usual civilian process involving international arrest warrants and extradition treaties and to seek the protection of the military. In an unprecedented development, the Minister of Defense of El Salvador accepted the validity of the international arrest warrants and turned the defendants over to civilian authorities where they are all now being held in custody.
In addition to former Minister of Defense General Rafael Humberto Larios and former Air Force Chief General Rafael Bustillo (of Iran Contra fame), the following defendants also surrendered: Colonel Francisco Elena Fuentes, Vice Defense Minister Juan Orlando Zepeda, Mariano Amaya Grimaldi, José Ricardo Espinoza Guerra, Gonzalo Guevara Cerritos and Antonio Ramiro Ávalos Vargas y Tomás Zárpate Castillo. General Emilio Ponce, former defense minister and also a general who had also been named, died of a heart attack prior to the issue of these warrants.
The Spanish courts have 60 days to formalize the extradition requests. The Salvadoran Supreme Court will ultimately decide whether to honor the arrest warrants and extradite the men to Spain to be prosecuted for their role in these outrageous crimes.
One of the main issues confronting the Salvadoran court is whether the amnesty law, which was passed in 1993 by the right-wing ARENA Party with no public consultation and against the wishes of U.N. peace negotiators, will continue to protect military officials for human rights abuses committed against the civilian population. The current leader of the ARENA Party, Former President Alfredo Cristiani, is thus far an un-indicted co-conspirator in the cover-up of the massacre.
While "self-amnesty" laws that protect military officials from human rights prosecutions are illegal under international law, how the court will rule is very difficult to predict. The Supreme Court could decide against extradition but for lifting the amnesty law. It could also to extradict and do nothing. Or it could approve the extradition. The ball is in the El Salvador Supreme Court.
The Spanish High Court has also requested the extradition of two officers living in the U.S. WE do not yet know how Interpol and the Department of Justice will respond to this request.
Regardless of what happens next, this is a stunning development in the now 21 year search for justice and the rule of law in El Salvador.
Terry Karl
Gildred Professor of Political Science and Latin American Studies
Department of Political Science
Encina Hall
Stanford University

Village in the clouds

2011-07-26T20:25:00.000-07:00

In a space between the two roofs of the Christian Base Community in San Ramon, a neighborhood in San Salvador, we could just make out the spot where the tiny village of The Clouds (Las Nubes) was situated. Perched precariously in the middle of the side of San Salvador volcano, Las Nubes is one of the communities in the country that has no running water, no electricity, and where villagers scrape by to survive.

“We are poor, but we do what we can to help our poor brothers and sisters,” says Hector, a member of the San Ramon CBC, a middle-aged married man with three children. “I do not work regularly, but what I do is give three days to God here at the community, and then the rest of the week I work to support my family." Las Nubes is one of Hector's projects. He travels up to the side of the volcano several times a week to help with bringing medicine or delivering food or water to residents in this poorest of the poor in San Salvador.

Chris Welch, a summer intern for CRISPAZ, has his second visit with Hector and other members of the Christian Base Community. This is where Welch, a 30-something high-school teacher from the Boston area, will spend his SIPPIE internship with CRISPAZ. Francisco and Elizabeth at CRISPAZ have worked out his schedule; Chris will take one bus from his quarters near the old U.S. embassy and head straight to San Ramon, a very poor neighborhood that lives in the shadow of the volcano and suffers from flooding every time waves of water and rock fall from the western side of the volcano.

Hector takes us on a walk up to a part of the neighborhood that suffers most every time there is torrential rain. Along a cut in the earth that serves as a wash when rain comes are tin-roofed shacks, curls of smoke rising out from under the tin where mothers prepare tortillas for their families in that age-old tradition. Hector points to one shack that has what appears to be siding from an old school bus. “How would you like to live there when the floods come?” he asks us. Although the shack is perhaps 10 feet above the bottom of the wash, when the rain falls, Hector says rushing water goes over the rooftop. No, we say. We would not like to live there, especially during a rain.

Lupe, a woman of perhaps 28 or 29 years, meanders down the wash carefully, managing her way around large stones that have been deposited by a recent rainfall. She is a member of the Christian Base Community, and seeing Hector, joins our group. “Only by the grace of God can we survive this place,” she says to us, smiling. The government told us earlier this year they would relocate us, but they say that every year and nothing happens.” We look up and down the wash, where Hector tells us that perhaps 100 families live, perched precariously at the earth’s end, only a push or a rock away from catastrophe.

Now we are walking back downhill, where Hector shows us where numerous bodies were deposited after a massive rain a few years ago. “Everything was washed away,” he says, now stopping at a two-story pink house. “This house is famous because it was the last house standing. It didn’t fall.” We peer around and seen new construction of tin and twine, logs and bedsprings used as fencing. “Everything has been built up again, but it will all come down,” Hector tells us. “We have asked the government to building some concrete piping and wall supports” for the wash, “but they don’t have any money for this.” He shrugs. They don’t have any money, period, he muses.

When the rain comes now, members of the Christian Base Community now give each other warning calls in their cell phones. If it is really bad, the CBC building, off to the side of the drainage area and a spot probably safe from falling stones and mudslides, can be set up to take families that might have to find quarters while they relocate or rebuild.

“We stick together and help each other,” Hector says. “This is how our community of faith works.”

-- Dennis O'Connor, executive director of CRISPAZ, is in El Salvador on a delegation and to meet with summer interns for the next two weeks.

Urge President Obama to Close the SOA

2011-07-19T14:12:00.000-07:00

President Obama has (if he chooses to use it) executive authority to close the SOA once and for all. But in order for him to feel the political pressure to do so, he needs to hear from all of us, via our members of Congress.

Until July 28, members of Congress are being urged to sign a letter to President Obama, urging him to close the SOA. Your congresswoman/congressman needs to hear from YOU and others in your district that this is a priority.

Contact your member of Congress via http://www.house.gov/ (or better by phone 202.224.3121). Ask him/her to add his/her name to the letter being circulated by Rep. McGovern, urging President Obama to issue an Executive Order to close the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, better known as the SOA.

Here is a sample phone script:

"As a constituent living in _________, I am calling to ask Congressman/woman ________ to add his/her name to the Congressional sign-on letter directed at President Obama, urging him to use his executive authority to close the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC); many know it as the former School of the Americas.
WHINSEC students continue to commit human rights abuses in places like Honduras and Colombia. Despite demands by Congress for greater transparency and accountability, the Pentagon arbitrarily reversed nearly 60 years of precedent and is now denying all requests to provide information to human rights organizations and the public about students and graduates of the school.

You know that Ohioans have cared deeply about this issue ever since it was discovered that the Salvadoran military men who murdered Cleveland’s church women had been trained by the US at the SOA. Each year we send hundreds of people to Georgia for the Vigil to Close the SOA. Some have gone to federal prison for their nonviolent protest.
I urge you to contact Cindy Buhl in Representative McGovern's office and ask that your boss be a signer to the Congressional sign-on letter to President Obama. I hope you will represent my views and support this letter."

If you feel you don’t know quite enough about the SOA (now called WHINSEC) to make this call, read more about the infamous “School of Assassins” at http://soaw.org/about-us/faq .

(Courtesy of our friends at IRTF in Cleveland.)

A Prayer for Dean Brackley

2011-07-14T20:59:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends:

We invite you to join a prayer group that is being brought together informally by Christians for Peace in El Salvador, to pray for the well-being of our friend and brother, Dean Brackley, SJ, who very recently was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. We will be offering our prayer on Saturday, July 16, at 9 a.m. EDST, the feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. We also are hopeful that our founder, friend and brother, Peter Hinde, OCarm, might ask fellow Carmelites to join us on this day of prayer for Dean Brackley as well.

We include with this email a suggested prayer from the Liturgy of the Hours, with some additions, for July 16. You may use this or any other prayer as you think of Father Brackley. The text is adapted from "Christian Prayer: The Liturgy of the Hours," by Catholic Book Publishing, 1976; and reflections from Archbishop Oscar Romero are from "Throught the Year with Oscar Romero: Daily Meditations," St. Anthony Messenger Press, 2005; translation by Irene B. Hodgson, Ph.D.

Please feel free to email this to others you think may want to join us in this prayer of intercession on July 16.

The CRISPAZ Team

Invitatory Prayer:
Come, let us sing to the Lord as we celebrate this feast of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Alleluia. Pray for our brother, Dean Brackley.

Our Lady of Mount Carmel:
Sacred Scripture celebrated the beauty of Carmel where the prophet Elijah defended the purity of Israel’s faith in the living God. In the 12^th century, hermits withdrew to the mountain and later, founded the Order devoted to the contemplative life under the patronage of Mary, the holy Mother of God.

Psalm 63:2-9
All Pray:
Blessed are you, O Mary, for the world’s salvation came forth from you; now in glory, you rejoice forever with the Lord. Intercede for our brother, Dean Brackley, with your Son, Alleluia.

Leader Prays:
O God, you are my God, for you I long;
for you my soul is thirsting.
My body pines for you
like a dry, weary land without water.
So I will bless you all my life
my lips will speak your praise.
So I will bless you all my life,
in your name I will lift up my hands.
My soul shall be filled as with a banquet,
my mouth shall praise you with joy.

All Pray:
On my bed I remember you.
On you I muse through the night
for you have been my help;
in the shadow of your wings I rejoice.
My soul clings to you;
your right hand holds me fast.

(All Pray: O Mary, intercede for our brother, Dean Brackley,
with your Son, Jesus. Alleluia.)

A Meditation from Monsignor Romero
Leader Reads: “Mary, brothers and sisters, is the symbol of the people that suffer oppression, injustice, because she represents the serene sorrow that waits for the resurrection. She is Christian pain, the pain of the church that is not in agreement with the present injustice, but with no resentment, waiting for the moment when the Resurrected One will return to give us the awaited redemption.”

All Pray: Monsignor Romero, please intercede for our brother Dean Brackley.

Leader: You are the glory of Jerusalem, the joy of Israel; you are the fairest honor of our race. Alleluia.

Psalm prayer
Leader: Father, creator of unfailing light, give that same light to those who call to you. May our lips praise you; our lives proclaim your goodness; our works give you honor, and our voices celebrate you for ever.

Canticle: Daniel 3:57-88, 56
Leader: Bless the Lord, all you works of the Lord.
Praise and exalt him above all forever.
Angels of the Lord, bless the Lord.
You heavens, bless the Lord.
All you waters above the heavens, bless the Lord.
All you hosts of the Lord, bless the Lord.
Sun and moon, bless the Lord.
Stars of heaven, bless the Lord.

All Pray: Every shower and dew, bless the Lord.
All you winds, bless the Lord.
Fire and heat, bless the Lord.
Cold and chill, bless the Lord.
Dew and rain, bless the Lord.
Frost and chill, bless the Lord.
Ice and snow, bless the Lord.
Nights and days, bless the Lord.
Light and darkness, bless the Lord.
Lightnings and clouds, bless the Lord.

Leader: Let the earth, bless the Lord.
Praise and exalt him above all forever.
Mountains and hills, bless the Lord.
Everything growing from the earth, bless the Lord.
You springs, bless the Lord.
Seas and rivers, bless the Lord.
You dolphins and all water creatures, bless the Lord.
All you birds of the air, bless the Lord.
All you beasts, wild and tame, bless the Lord.
You sons of men, bless the Lord.

All Pray: O Israel, bless the Lord.
Praise and exalt him above all forever.
Priests of the Lord, bless the Lord.
Servants of the Lord, bless the Lord.
Spirits and souls of the just, bless the Lord.
Holy men of humble heart, bless the Lord.
Hananiah, Azariah, Mishael, bless the Lord.
Praise and exalt him above all forever.

Leader: Let us bless the Father, the and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Let us praise and exalt him above all forever.
Blessed are you, Lord, in the firmament of heaven.
Praiseworthy and glorious and exalted above all forever.

All Pray: O Lord, we pray for our brother Dean Brackley.

A Meditation from Monsignor Romero
Leader: “No one understands the poor as well as one who is evangelically poor. Such persons know what the hunger of a mother, of a child, of people living in a shack is like, because they also live it, perhaps not in identical physical conditions, but in the spirituality of the poor that makes them able to understand and share it. Such people don’t give as from one above to one below; now is not the time for paternalism, it is a time for brotherhood and sisterhood, of feeling that one is brother or sister, that what is important to the poor, to the peasant, to the have-nots, is important to me.”

All Pray: Monsignor Romero, intercede on the behalf of our brother, Dean Brackley, a Jesuit priest who has given most of his adult life to understanding the poor and their spirituality in El Salvador.

Leader: O Virgin Mary, how great your cause for joy; God found you worthy to bear Christ our Savior, Alleluia.

Leader: Sing a new song to the Lord,
his praise in the assembly of the faithful.
Let Israel rejoice in its maker,
let Zion’s sons exult in their king.
Let them praise his name with dancing
and make music with timbrel and harp.

All Pray: For the Lord takes delight in his people.
He crowns the poor with salvation.
Let the faithful rejoice in their glory,
shout for joy and take their rest.
Let the praise of God be on their lips
and a two-edged sword in their hand,
to deal out vengeance to the nations
and punishment on all the peoples;
to bind their kings in chains
and their nobles in fetters of iron;
to carry out the sentence pre-ordained;
this honor is for all his faithful.

Reading:
Leader: I rejoice heartily in the Lord;
in my God is the joy of my soul;
For he has clothed me with a robe of salvation,
and wrapped me in a mantle of justice,
like a bride bedecked with her jewels.

Intercessions:
All Pray: Let us glorify our Savior, who chose the Virgin Mary for his mother. Let us ask him: May your mother intercede for Dean Brackley, Lord.
Son of Justice, the immaculate Virgin was the white dawn announcing your rising: grant that our brother, Dean Brackley, may always live in the light of your coming.
Savior of Mankind, your mother stood at the foot or your cross: grant that through her intercession, our brother Dean Brackley might rejoice to share in your passion.
Let us glorify our Savior, who chose the Virgin Mary for his mother. Let us ask him: May your mother intercede for Dean Brackley, Lord.

Leader: Lord God, give to our brother, Dean Brackley, the joy of health in mind and body. With the prayers of the Virgin Mary to help us, guide us through the sorrows of this life to eternal happiness in the life to come.
Grant this through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

Amen

Military Service Plan for At-Risk Youth Raises Controvery

2011-07-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

By Edgardo Ayala
(From IPS News Service)

SAN SALVADOR -- Activists and experts on education flatly reject a proposal by the leftwing government of Mauricio Funes to bring back compulsory military service, for young people at risk of being recruited by youth gangs and organised crime.

Under the proposed scheme, some 5,000 at-risk youngsters between the ages of 16 and 18 would receive six months training from army officers in military discipline and physical fitness, but without weapons. They would be trained to work in civil protection and risk prevention efforts during emergencies.

They would then receive six months of courses in mountain climbing and other sports, first aid, and vocational and skills training. The entire process would take a year, and during that time they would receive 250 dollars a month and would stay in "citizen training centres" specifically set up for the purpose and run by the army.

For the entire story, link here: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56301

Social Organizations Denounce Police and Military Abuses against PROCOMES

2011-07-06T19:42:00.000-07:00

Members of the Communal Center of El Salvador (CODESA) condemn the abuse of authority by the PNC

Margarita Posada of the Citizen Alliance Against the Privatization of Health and the National Health Forum denounced the raid and unjustified arrest of 35 people in the local office of PROCOMES last Saturday July 2 in Nejapa, San Salvador.

The Center for Training for Local Development and Solidarity Economies (PROCOMES), with 24 years of experience in 9 departments around the nation, works with the vulnerable population and at-risk youth.

Posada reported that on Saturday July 2nd, a combined force of 270 National Salvadoran Police (PCN) and Army troops raided the local PROCOMES office and arrested 35 people working there.

“They entered the office without a search warrant after having cut the PROCOMES office fence and arrested the guard, whom they first told they were pursuing a criminal; later, they stated that they were looking for weapons in the office and proceeded to arrest these individuals, this is an abuse that takes us back to the 70s,” she expressed.

According to information received by the social organizations, PROCOMES was working with at-risk youth in Nejapa, along the lines of the National Youth Policy proposed by the government.

“19 years after the Peace Accords, this type of brutal police and military actions becomes a worry for social organizatioons working with at-risk youth . . . we greatly worry that they say that the meeting of the people there was to extort, rob and other [crimianal activities],” she said.

“We call for the end of this type of repressive actions, that do not support for the climate of peace that the government promised,” she added.

“We hope that this was an isolated case,” added Margarita Posada, who invited the civilian population to follow the events and prevent a wave of repression.

Mario Chavez of the Communal Center of El Salvador (CODESAL) stated that they are not against operations by the authorities, “but rather the violent form in which they entered, given that the damaged materials, and furthermore did not have a judicial order to enter.”

CODESAL representative Eduardo Salazar said that this PNC action is similar to that of the repressive forces of the past. [IE—National Guard, National Police, and Treasury Police]

“We demand that the Director of the PNC and the Minister of Defense act professional within the framework of the law and respect for human rights, given that the events that happened against PROCOMES do not continue to happen, given that these groups work for the development of the nation,” maintained Salazar.

The PNC arrested during the operation several people related to one of the guards, which is presumed to be the motive for violently entering the installations.

From Diario CoLatino, July 6, 2011

Translation by Larry Ladutke

Drug War Pushed Into El Salvador

2011-06-29T19:40:00.000-07:00

This past week was a busy one for the masters of war in Central America.

Presidents and bankers gathered at a high profile meeting on the drug war in Antigua Guatemala from June 21-23, producing a familiar sounding series of commitments to fight organized crime in Central America. The event was rounded out with pledges of almost two billion dollars in foreign aid and loans, much of which will go towards intelligence gathering and training of police forces.

The International Conference in Support of the Central America Security Strategy brought together Central American heads of state, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos, Mexico’s Felipe Calderon, and representatives from more than fifty countries, including Israel, Spain, Canada, and South Korea. Also present was Luis Alberto Moreno, president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), as well as representatives from the World Bank, the Organization of American States, the United Nations, and the European Union.

See the whole story at: http://upsidedownworld.org/main/international-archives-60/3093-security-conference-vows-to-push-drug-war-into-central-america

The march of unsustainability in El Salvador gains speed

2011-06-16T09:16:00.000-07:00

From "upsidedownworld" website:

In the last year, El Salvador has been cited in at least three reports issued by international institutions that have credibility among public officials, politicians and businesspeople. However, this grave situation has gone unnoticed since then, to the point where it is referred to as an exagerration or attempt to discredit certain actors. According to ECLAC, we already suffer from hydric stress, meaning the availability of water for human consumption tends to be less than 1750 mts3 per person per year. In the 2010 Report of the Global Fund for Disaster Reduction and Recovery, our country tops the list of highest-risk countries in the world: 88.7% of the territory is considered at risk of disaster, and 95.4% of the population is at risk. At the same time, the organization Germanwatch located in El Salvador in the first place in the Global Climate Risk Index 2009.

For the full report, go to http://www.upsidedownworld.org/

Disappearance of Juan Francisco Duran Ayala in Cabañas

2011-06-15T12:28:00.000-07:00

An update on the mining situation from our friends "Voices on the Border" with assistance from our friends Sister Cities...

Action Alert - Disappearance of Juan Francisco Duran Ayala in Cabañas
   On Sunday we posted an alert that anti-mining activist Juan Francisco Duran Ayala has been missing for over a week. He disappeared the day after he was hanging anti-mining posters in Ilobasco, Cabañas. Representatives of the CAC, the local environmental organization to which Juan Francisco belongs, report that the Mayor of Ilobasco, Eliseo “Cheyo” Castellanos ordered municipal police to remove the signs that Juan Francisco was hanging the day he disappeared.
   Please join Juan Francisco’s family and friends in calling on the Salvadoran authorities, including the Attorney General’s office and the National Civilian Police, to set up a special search party to find Juan Francisco, as well as investigate all cases of threats and violence against civil society actors in the region. The CAC demands that these investigations also consider the links between the powerful network of local mayors, including Mayor José Bautista of San Isidro, Mayor Edgar Bonilla of Sensuntepeque, and Mayor “Cheyo” Castellanos of Ilobasco, and Pacific Rim Mining Company.

Cheyo Castellanos - Mayor of Ilobasco
Here’s what you can do:
Send an email to the Attorney General Romeo Barahona (see sample email below) and Manuel Melgar, the Minister of Justice and Security, to demand a full investigation and protection for the victims. Please send the email to Barahona’s assistant at hector.burgos@fgr.gob.sv and to Minister Melgar jusegministro@seguridad.gob.sv and his assistantSandra.lazo@seguridad.gob.sv.
If you speak Spanish, please also call Salvadoran Attorney General Romeo Barahona at 011-503- 2230-6350 (see sample script below). Please also call Minister Melgar 011-503-7070-0081 (see sample script below).
Sample Email to Attorney General Barahona
hector.burgos@fgr.gob.sv
Estimado Señor Fiscal General de la República,
   Como miembro de la comunidad internacional, quiero expresar mi profunda preocupación sobre las nuevas amenazas y los casos de violencia contra líderes sociales en Cabañas.
Hace más de una semana Juan Francisco Duran Ayala, miembro del Comité Ambiental de Cabañas en Defensa del Agua y Cultura (CAC) desapareció, a pocos días después de haber participado en actividades contra la minería en Cabañas. Urge que el PNC y la Fiscalía establezcan un equipo especializado de investigación sobre este caso.
   Además, urge una investigación profunda y eficaz sobre este último caso y todas las amenazas contra los ambientalistas de Cabañas, para determinar quiénes son los autores materiales, intelectuales y financieros. Es necesario también re-abrir los casos de Marcelo Rivera, Dora Alicia Sorto y Ramiro Rivera para investigar vínculos entre estos caso, los asesinatos de Darwin Serrano y Gerardo Abrego León, las nuevas amenazas contra el personal de Radio Victoria, y la desaparición de Juan Francisco Duran Ayala.
Finalmente, tomando en cuenta los nexos entre esta violencia y la lucha contra la minería, los casos de violencia y las amenazas contra líderes sociales en Cabañas requieren una investigación profunda para identificar los autores materiales e intelectuales. Estas investigaciones deben de incluir posibles nexos entre la violencia y la compañía minera Pacific Rim, y las autoridades locales como los alcaldes de San Isidro, Ilobasco y Sensuntepeque.
   El hecho de que la violencia y amenazas que se han dado en Cabañas desde 2007 siguen en impunidad ha permitido que surgieran los nuevos casos de violencia. Pido que, por favor, tome las medidas necesarias para asegurar justicia y protección para los afectados.
Agradezco de antemano sus gestiones para agilizar las investigaciones y espero que pronto se haga justicia en estos casos. Estaré pendiente de las acciones de la Fiscalía y seguiré informando a los y las funcionarias de gobierno en mi país sobre estos casos.
Atentamente,
Your Name

Sample Email to Minister of Justice and Security jusegministro@seguridad.gob.sv andSandra.lazo@seguridad.gob.sv
Estimado Señor Ministro de Seguridad y Justicia,
   Como miembro de la comunidad internacional, quiero expresar mi profunda preocupación sobre las nuevas amenazas y los casos de violencia contra líderes sociales en Cabañas.
Hace más de una semana Juan Francisco Duran Ayala, miembro del Comité Ambiental de Cabañas en Defensa del Agua y Cultura (CAC) desapareció, a pocos días después de haber participado en actividades contra la minería en Cabañas. Urge que el PNC y la Fiscalía establezcan un equipo especializado de investigación sobre este caso.
   Además, urge una investigación profunda y eficaz sobre este último caso y todas las amenazas contra los ambientalistas de Cabañas, para determinar quiénes son los autores materiales, intelectuales y financieros. Es necesario también re-abrir los casos de Marcelo Rivera, Dora Alicia Sorto y Ramiro Rivera para investigar vínculos entre estos casos, los asesinatos de Darwin Serrano y Gerardo Abrego León, las nuevas amenazas contra el personal de Radio Victoria, y la desaparición de Juan Francisco Duran Ayala.
   Finalmente, tomando en cuenta los nexos entre esta violencia y la lucha contra la minería, los casos de violencia y las amenazas contra líderes sociales en Cabañas requieren una investigación profunda para identificar los autores materiales e intelectuales. Estas investigaciones deben de incluir posibles nexos entre la violencia y la compañía minera Pacific Rim, y las autoridades locales como los alcaldes de San Isidro, Ilobasco y Sensuntepeque.
   El hecho de que la violencia y amenazas que se han dado en Cabañas desde 2007 siguen en impunidad ha permitido que surgieran los nuevos casos de violencia. Pido que, por favor, tome las medidas necesarias para asegurar justicia y protección para los afectados.
Agradezco de antemano sus gestiones para agilizar las investigaciones y espero que pronto se haga justicia en estos casos. Estaré pendiente de las acciones de la PNC y seguiré informando a los y las funcionarias de gobierno en mi país sobre estos casos.
Atentamente,
Your Name

Translation
   As a member of the international community, I want to express my deep concern about the new cases of violence and threats against social leaders in Cabañas.
   More than a week ago Juan Francisco Duran Ayala, member of the Environmental Committee of Cabañas in Defense of Water and Cultura (CAC) disappeared, a few days after having participated in activities protesting mining in Cabañas. A specialized task force of prosecutors and members of the National Civilian police should be assigned to investigate this case.
   In addition, there needs to be a thorough and efficient investigations into this recent case and all of the threats to environmentalists in Cabañas, to determine who the material, intellectual and financial authors are. It is also necessary to re-open the Marcelo Rivera, Dora Alicia Sorto, and Ramiro Rivera cases in order to investigate links between those cases, the murders of Darwin Serrano and Gerardo Abrego León, the new threats against the staff of Radio Victoria, and the disappearance of Juan Francisco Duran Ayala.
Finally, taking into account the ties between this violence and the anti-mining struggles, the cases of violence and threats against Cabañas social movement leaders require a thorough investigation to identify the material and intellectual authors. These investigations should look into the possible ties between the violence and the mining company Pacific Rim as well as local authorities like the mayors of San Isidro, Ilobasco, and Sensuntepeque.
   This new case of violence has arisen because the violence and threats that have occurred in Cabañas since 2007 remain in impunity. I ask that you please take the necessary measures to assure justice and protection for those affected.
   Thank you in advance for your efforts to begin thorough investigations and I hope that soon there will be justice in these cases. I will continue to follow the actions of the Attorney General’s office and the National Civil Police (PCN) and will continue informing my elected officials about these cases.

Call Script for Attorney General Barahona (direct number for his assistant, Hector Burgos: 011-503- 2230-6350)
Buenos (días/tardes)
Mi nombre es_______________________ y llamo para expresar mi preocupación sobre la desaparición de Juan Francisco Duran Ayala y la violencia contra líderes sociales en Cabañas.
Urge una investigación profunda sobre la desaparición del Señor Duran Ayala con un equipo especializado, y así también es necesario re-abrir los casos de Marcelo Rivera, Dora Alicia Sorto y Ramiro Rivera para investigar vínculos entre estos caso, los asesinatos de Darwin Serrano y Gerardo Abrego León, las nuevas amenazas contra el personal de Radio Victoria y la desaparición del Señor Duran Ayala.
El hecho de que la violencia y amenazas anteriores quedaron en impunidad ha permitido que surgieran los nuevos hechos de violencia. Pido que el Fiscal General tome las medidas necesarias para asegurar justicia y protección para las y los afectados.
Gracias

Call Script for Minister of Justice and Security Manuel Melgar (direct number: 011-503- 7070-0081)
Buenos (días/tardes)
Mi nombre es_______________________ y llamo para expresar mi preocupación sobre la desaparición de Juan Francisco Duran Ayala y la violencia contra líderes sociales en Cabañas.
Urge una investigación profunda sobre la desaparición del Señor Duran Ayala con un equipo especializado, y así también es necesario re-abrir los casos de Marcelo Rivera, Dora Alicia Sorto y Ramiro Rivera para investigar vínculos entre estos caso, los asesinatos de Darwin Serrano y Gerardo Abrego León, las nuevas amenazas contra el personal de Radio Victoria y la desaparición del Señor Duran Ayala.
El hecho de que la violencia y amenazas anteriores quedaron en impunidad ha permitido que surgieran los nuevos hechos de violencia. Pido que el PNC tome las medidas necesarias para asegurar justicia y protección para las y los afectados.
Gracias.
And we'd like to thank the folks at CISPES and US Sister Cities for their hard work in drafting the letter and script!
Cheyo Castellanos - Mayor of Ilobasco

Former CRISPAZ Board Member Dies May 27

2011-06-01T07:35:00.000-07:00

Board members and friends of CRISPAZ mourned the May 27 passing of Rev. William Lytle, one of the first Board members at Christians for Peace in El Salvador. He was 87 and died of cancer only days within discovering his disease had metastasized. Lytle is survived by his wife Renate Frick Lytle Gatos, and children, daughters Ruth Hamilton of Washington, D.C., and Aimee Hearn of Groveton, Texas; and sons David Lytle of San Antonio and Paul Bierman-Lytle of Denver. Lytle had nine grandchildren and one great-grandchild. He was preceded in death by his first wife of 58 years, Faith Williamson Lytle of San Antonio.
   Lytle was born in Pittsburgh July 3, 1923, and after the influence of growing up in his father’s United Presbyterian Church in Ben Avon, PA, Lytle became an ordained minister in 1947. He and wife, Faith, were “mobile missionaries” in the remote ranching areas of Reserve and Corona, N.M., and then they moved in 1962 to Clarksville, AR, where he directed the Ozarks Area Mission program at the College of the Ozarks for 11 years. Beginning in 1973, he served 17 years as pastor at Madison Square Presbyterian Church in San Antonio. He retired in 1990 as pastor.
   In 1978, while in San Antonio, he was elected Moderator of the General Assembly of the United Presbyterian Church USA, leading that year’s annual national gathering of church representatives and visiting as the church’s representative through the year throughout the United States, also visiting Ireland and numerous African nations.
   “Bill Lytle served on the CRISPAZ Board from the very beginning” of the organization, in 1985,” recalled Rev. Peter Hinde, OCarm, one of the three founders of Christians for Peace in El Salvador. “With one interruption, he served for a total of 12 years, three of those years as president of the Board. He gave extra time in the beginning as a member of the Board Support Committee for the first staff members of CRISPAZ in San Antonio. Bill brought a deep spirituality to CRISPAZ and commitment to the values of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. One time on a Board meeting he was asked to do a favorite recitation from memory.: the complete fifth and sixth chapters of St. Matthew’s Gospel…This was no recitation, but the Gospel come alive in the accents and gestures of Bill in sharing Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. He held us spellbound.”
   “Bill’s smile made me melt with joy,” said current CRIZPAZ Chair Cathy Cornell. “Bill was a big man. Yes, he was tall, but his presence was big. Not a flashy, look at me kind of presence but a feeling of solid calm and caring. One of my first memories of Bill was meeting at Jennifer Casolo’s mom’s house in a small town in Connecticut and his wise and thoughtful presence taught me so much – about valuing each voice and holding the large view. But mostly what I remember is Bill’s big smile…with joy.”
   “When I think back to the many CRISPAZ meetings where Bill was present or facilitating, my picture and feelings of him are that of Bill the Reconciler,” said Paul Knitter, former CRISPAZ Board President. “He had an easy-going or free-flowing, but at the same time clear and strong, way of inviting people to both speak their minds and listen to what others had to say. His was a gentleness that brought people together.”
   Peter Hinde also recalled Lytle’s ability to see through the darkness of the military in El Salvador during the civil war.
   “Bill on one of his visits in the 1980s in El Salvador with others of CRISPAZ had an interview with General Eugenio Vides Casanova. He commented afterwards how a fine uniform could cover deep evil. Vides Casanova, with another top officer of the Salvador Armed Forces was later charged and convicted in a civil trial in Miami court of torture of two Salvadorans who had survived and were living in the United States, along with two retired military leaders.”
   Always eager to be engaged in community, Lytle was key in the development of Hospice for people living in downtown San Antonio, where with his first wife, Faith, they also established a base for Habitat for Humanity that operated for a quarter-century. After Faith’s death, Lytle moved to Los Gatos, CA, to marry a college-friend, Renate Frick, who herself was widowed. “Friends attested that late marriage was a marriage leading Bill into the foyer of Heaven,” Peter Hinde said.

Spanish Courts Charge 20 in Killing of Jesuits in 1989

2011-05-31T10:28:00.000-07:00

A news report from the New York Times today (May 31), reports that a Spanish judge has issued arrest warrants Monday, May 30, for some of the top leaders of El Salvador's military leaders, accusing them of planning and implementing the murders of the six Jesuit priests at the University of Central America, their housekeeper, and her daughter. The Times reports that in a 77-page document, the judge, Eloy Valasco Nunez of Spain's National Court, said the 20 men named in the warrants never had doubts about "carrying out the most execrable crimes against people merely to impose their strategies and ideas."
Those named in the document included Rafael Humberto Larios, who was the Salvadoran defense minister at the time of the killing; Juan Orlando Zepeda, the vice defense minister; Rene Emilio Ponce, leader of the Army's Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Inocente Orlando Montano, the vice minister of public safety. The full report is in the May 31 edition of the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/world/americas/31salvador.html?_r=1&hpw

Current Realities in Salvadoran Gang Cultures

2011-05-26T07:20:00.000-07:00

Considering New Options for Solutions to Violence

Brian Rude, a Board member of Christians for Peace in El Salvador, has dedicated his life to working with at-risk youth throughout the country, especially those caught up in the violence of the country’s youth gangs. Brian is the founder of Quetzalcuatl, an organization that works in prison ministry, and educational programming for at risk youth. Following is a reflection from Brian on the current state-of-affairs in El Salvador vis-à-vis the gangs.

By Rev. Brian Rude

Up until two decades ago, as the armed conflict in El Salvador was being mediated to a close, "gangs" had been involved mainly in school or soccer rivalries -- local turf battles. About this time, they took on a Los Angeles street-gang mystique. Salvadoran youth, some exiled to Los Angeles, many others practically abandoned in their home neighbourhoods in El Salvador, banded together for survival, especially for physical reasons, but also financial ones. They sought security, identity, a family and a space to call home. Over this period they are portrayed to have become better organized and more violent.

     Anyone who followed or who remembers the brutality of government "security" forces during the war years could hardly label these youth as being anti-social in this context. They adapted remarkably well and with amazing creativity and organizational skills to the society which surrounded them, conforming to and reshaping this culture of military, police and death-squad assassinations and massacres, a perverse and pervasive reality which no doubt served as one of their models, at least subconsciously.
     One could approach the current reality from a statistical perspective, though statistics are hard to come by, distressingly diverse, and often unreliable. How many gang members are there? The number of those in prison -- about 8,000, 1/3 of the total number of inmates in El Salvadoran prisons -- is perhaps the most reliable indicator here. More than double, or even triple, that number could be outside the prison walls. Harsher laws have led to greater mobility and flexibility on their part. They have largely abandoned their former passion for defending their "barrio" or neighborhoods. Their territory might now well be their clientele, rather than any particular geographical space.
     A variant question might better be posed: how many potential gang members are living in Salvadoran barrios? What factors might affect whether or not young Salvadorans follow in the footsteps of their older siblings, their parents, their neighbours, who often serve as their models, even their heroes? As with those who have gone before, these potential recruits have few other options or opportunities to pursue. The reality which surrounds them easily draws them in.
     The debate concerning what percentage of homicides, extortion, drug trafficking, etc., is attributable to the gang population is quite speculative, leading to wildly diverse "statistics", ranging from 90 percent (previous "iron fist" ARENA presidents and mass media) to 50 percent (National Civilian Police, 2010) to 10-12 percent (forensic medicine, 2009, 2010). The media, of course, rely heavily on the sensationalist 90 percent end of the scale. With this bias, they play their role as shapers of public opinion. The public, in turn, is applying pressure for public policy to meet the ensuing demand. Gangs, of course, are rarely given a voice, or a chance to speak for themselves.
     Gang relationships to organized crime is also a matter of constant speculation, with little evidence to indicate the true reality. One former president even linked the gangs to Al Qaeda. More recently they tend to be linked to "Los Zeta", a Mexican drug cartel of ex police officers apparently making inroads into Central America. If levels of involvement are difficult to determine, even more so would be the level of self-determination or leadership these gangs might have in such relationships. Are they pawns or
partners?
     Gang culture is not monolithic or uniform. While there are two primary opposing gangs in El Salvador ("Mara Salvatrucha" and "18"), the latter is divided into two, such that two prisons are needed to keep them separate. There are also divisions between active members and "calmados", or those who have withdrawn to some degree from active involvement.
     Few in Salvadoran society, especially the authorities or spokespersons, would recognize these youth as their own sons and daughters, their own flesh and blood, the offspring of the patria. Few would be willing to acknowledge them as mirrors of society. They are denigrated and demonized unceasingly, especially by politicians and the media. Those making the laws have perhaps never had a personal, face-to-face conversation with a gang member. The chasm dividing gang culture from much of everyday society
is enormous. Conversation and dialogue are ruled out as potential strategies for overcoming the gap and the animosities: What was learned from the process of dialogue leading to the Peace Accords in 1992 is not being applied to this armed conflict.
     Ever harsher, more humiliating, even inhumane, treatment, on the streets and in the prisons, is considered to be the most appropriate, productive solution. The military, the Armed Forces, is considered to be the best option for putting these youth in their places, an option being questioned with ever greater concern by those affected and those involved, including the rapporteur for the Organization of American States, reporting on a monitoring visit to the nation's penitentiary system conducted in October, 2010. A new proscription law, passed in September 2010, is now being implemented, after some delays due to technical interpretations. This law imposes a 7-year prison sentence for belonging to a gang, and several more years for a leadership role within the gang.
     There are some, such as the members of a coalition of NGO's, who consider that a more respectful, more humane strategy would bear better fruits. Inclusion, rather than further isolation -- a strategy rarely considered, never attempted and certainly never implemented with this sector -- could potentially draw them into society in a healthier, more productive way.
     There is a growing effort to approach this phenomenon through personal story-telling. Documentaries, articles, movies, websites and books are being dedicated to presenting these gang members as human beings, as individuals with families, personal histories, dreams and aspirations, emotions . . . Not many citizens have the chance, or the desire, to rub shoulders with these individuals, much less the opportunity to hear their stories face to face, smile to smile, followed by a big hug.
     What gang members -- as we all -- need, is not to be penned off, surrounded by machine guns toted by masked, anonymous, ominous soldiers, isolated from their families and all of society, but an open heart and a listening ear. To the measure that they are included in the human community, they could well respond in surprisingly affirming ways. We hope it's not too late to pursue this option.

Children's Disappearance Highlighted in Human Rights Court

2011-05-24T11:49:00.000-07:00

The disappearance of four girls and two children by the Salvadoran armed forces between 1981 and 1983 was brought to the public forum May 17 during a meeting of the Pan American Court of Human Rights in Panama City, Panama. For the first time in a meeting of this kind, the Salvadoran government accepted responsibility for the disappearances during the Salvadoran civil war, and it also shouldered the responsibility for violations of the law. The victims were represented by Pro-Busqueda, the Salvadoran agency dedicated to finding missing family members disappeared during the 12-year civil war in El Salvador, and by the Center of Justice and International Law (CEJIL). This report was submitted by Pro-Busqueda. The case before the court is the result of three reviews in which the disappearance of members of the Ramirez family, some of whom were illegally adopted by members of the military and whose identities were changed, and some who disappeared altogether, according to reports. Representatives of the families stated that their main desire was to know the location of their beloved family members, but military authorities have refused to give data about the location of those who disappeared, according to Diario Co Latino, a weekly Salvadoran newspaper. Because of the military's reluctance to provide any information, Pro-Busqueda members requested the creation of mechanisms to guarantee that the children's whereabouts become known to the court system. Ester Alvarenda, a spokesperson from Pro-Busqueda, noted that the court's demands on disclosure so that the many hundreds of victims' families can benefit as well.

“Cartel of Texis” under investigation in El Salvador

2011-05-18T19:44:00.000-07:00

A report May 17 in the digital news magazine El Faro confirmed recent news reports that the Salvadoran government is investigating the purported drug gang “The Cartel of Texis” for its involvement in drug trafficking in El Salvador. El Pais, the Spanish newspaper, also reported this week that an investigation of the group was under way in El Salvador. Reports state that the cartel is alleged to traffic in cocaine in El Salvador, as a mid-point between South American sites and the

United States

On Tuesday, Mauricio Funes, President of El Salvador, confirmed the existence of the drug network in the northern and northwestern parts of El Salvador, and that the group was called the Cartel of Texis, a reference to its operating in the northern municipality of Texistepeque, where it is alleged that the cartel has infiltrated business, government and police leadership from top to bottom. El Faro also reports that a group of Mexican hitmen known as The Zeds, are freely operating nearby in

Guatemala

In March, The Los Angeles Times reported that Mexican drug gangs making major and rapid inroads into El Salvador call the small Central American nation “El Caminito,” The Little Pathway, due to is recent role in the increase in the narco trade in Mexico and parts south. The Times reported that new highway systems leading to and running through El Salvador have helped fuel the growth in trafficking, allowing the drug lords to use the highways as overland routes for their deadly cargos.

In addition, the Times noted that El Salvador’s use of the United States dollar as its official currency “makes the nation “a money-launderer’s paradise.”

Funes to Manage Security Funds from the United States

2011-05-10T20:45:00.000-07:00

SAN SALVADOR – Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes and his government will manage the distribution of a $200 million security investment into Central America, an announcement by U.S. President Barack Obama when he was in El Salvador in March. Funes and his administration will help funnel cash into a regional security fund that could cost upwards of a billion dollars, according to figures released from the current gathering of defense ministers, security agencies and other governmental agencies in Central America. The report was from the website Contrapunto.com.sv.

The international forum, began meeting Tuesday, May 10 in San Salvador. A major topic of discussion at the meeting was the current status of ocean security of Panama and Costa Rica, nations without naval powers. The next meeting of the group will be held in June in Guatemala.

Christian Democrats Take a Final Bow

2011-05-08T02:35:00.000-07:00

That grand old party in El Salvador, The Christian Democrats, was officially disbanded at the end of April in a ruling by the Salvadoran Supreme Court. The Christian Democratic Party, as well as the conservative National Conciliation Party, both were scratched by the court because they failed to meet the nation's three-percent rule in the most recent national elections. The Christian Democrats were the party of power during much of the tumultuous 1980s, with the noteworthy accomplishment of being the first party to peacefully hand over leadership after an election to a rival party in the history of El Salvador under the watch of then-president Jose Napolean Duarte. The Christian Democrats' star has long been fading with the ascendancy of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), which currently governs El Salvador.

The Post-American Hemisphere Has Arrived

2011-04-29T23:58:00.000-07:00

Russell Crandall, associate professor of International Politics at Davidson College and recently Director for Andean Affairs at the National Security Council from 2010-2011, writes in the current (May-June) edition of Foreign Affairs that Washington is rapidly and surely losing its leverage in Latin America. His article, “The Post-American Hemisphere: Power and Politics in an Autonomous Latin America,” explains that as U.S. influence in Latin America has faded, Latin America’s own capabilities have grown. “The region has grown into an era of unprecedented economic, political, and diplomatic success,” Crandall writes.

While there have been impressive success stories – economic growth has been a steady reality in Brazil and Chile, as most recent examples – there still remain problem areas. Crandall cites one example in Guatemala, which “ranks among the world’s poorest countries,” and has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, with 6,000 people killed each year in a nation of 13 million.

To be sure, Central and South America continue to look northwards to the United States at critical moments: during the crisis in Honduras, in spite of wobbly moments on the world stage there, Crandall notes that leaders in the region were grateful for the role, limited that it was, the U.S. played in diffusing what could have been a more violent outcome to Honduras.

“Over the past decade or so, the United States’ willingness and ability to excert control in the region have diminished,” Crandall writes. This has occurred in part because more important issues, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have forced Latin America down the policymaking food chain.”

And that has led to bold actions and words by leaders in Latin America speaking out against the U.S., witnessed by diatribes from Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia. Morales expelled the U.S. ambassador and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in 2008, and he shut down U.S. funded democracy programs in 2009. Because our hands were tied with the wars we were waging in the Middle East, Crandall noted that George W. Bush, normally not at a loss for words to those who operated “against him,” was strangely silent about Morales’ actions.

The real power shift in Latin America seems to be a move to more coordination among neighbors. Brazil will continue to play a crucial role in the economic vitality of the region, a result, Crandall notes, that is due to a lack of play by the United States. “As one diplomat recently put it, ‘The new imperialists have arrived, and they speak Portuguese.’”

Is there good news for our relations? Crandall says yes. In his second term as president, George W. Bush tempered his rhetoric focused on Latin America and began a conciliatory course that the Obama administration has continued today. And the United States “enjoys robust partnerships with governments of all political stripes in the region – with conservative governments in Chile, Mexico and Peru as well as more leftist ones in Brazil, El Salvador, and Uruguay.”

It remains to be seen how well we do in the remainder of the Obama adminstration’s watch of our neighbors to the south.