Swatting Flies

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

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

    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

     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.