El Salvador

Salvadoran Maquila Plants Use Gangs To Break Unions

March 25, 2015 Edgardo Ayala, www.ipsnews.net Educate! El Salvador, Violence, Workers Rights and Jobs

Textile companies that make clothing for transnational brands in El Salvador are accused of forging alliances with gang members to make death threats against workers and break up their unions, according to employees who talked to IPS and to international organisations. Workers at maquila or maquiladora plants – which import materials and equipment duty-free for assembly or manufacturing for re-export – speaking on condition of anonymity said that since 2012 the threats have escalated, as part of the generalised climate of violence in this Central American country.

El Salvador Farmers Successfully Defy Monsanto

March 24, 2015 Dahr Jamail, www.truth-out.org Resist! El Salvador, Food and Agriculture, GMOs, Monsanto, Worker Rights and Jobs

The perils of ingesting food that has any contact with a Monsanto-produced product are in the news on nearly a weekly basis. As Dr. Jeff Ritterman has documented, Monstanto's herbicide, Roundup, has beenlinked to a fatal kidney disease epidemic, and has also been repeatedly linked to cancer. Recently, a senior research scientist at MIT predicted that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, will cause half of all children to have autism by 2025. Farmers in El Salvador are acutely aware of the importance of producing their own seeds, and avoiding those from the bioengineering giant.

Farmer Cooperatives, Not Monsanto, Supply El Salvador With Seeds

March 13, 2015 Nathan Weller, www.truth-out.org.com Create! Cooperatives, El Salvador, Food and Agriculture, GMOs, Monsanto

In the face of overwhelming competition skewed by the rules of free trade, farmers in El Salvador have managed to beat the agricultural giants like Monsanto and Dupont to supply local corn seed to thousands of family farmers. Local seed has consistently outperformed the transnational product, and farmers helped develop El Salvador’s own domestic seed supply–all while outsmarting the heavy hand of free trade. This week, the Ministry of Agriculture released a new round of contracts to provide seed to subsistence farmers nationwide through its Family Agriculture Program. Last year, over 560,000 family farmers across El Salvador planted corn and bean seed as part of the government’s efforts to revitalize small scale agriculture, and ensure food security in the rural marketplace.

Participatory Democracy In El Salvador

February 18, 2015 Beverly Bell, www.otherworldsarepossible.org Create! Autonomy, Community, El Salvador, Participatory Democracy

It is completely rooted in the people. There is a lot of wisdom in people, and so what leaders have to do is be with the people, listen to the people, and address the issues that the people raise, because together, we collectively build the alternatives that actually work. Anything that is done from an office is not going to coincide with reality. So we’re building from the people up. That characterizes the organization where I received my education, La Coordinadora. Our strategic development plans arise from huge assemblies. We can spend up to six months building our strategies, because we need input from all sectors and communities. This plan must work out for us, but it’s also important that it is taken up at the national governmental level, to inform the administration’s five-year plan.

Six Jesuit Scholars And The American War On Self-Determination

November 16, 2014 Matt Peppe, www.mintpressnews.com Educate! El Salvador, School of Americas, Wars and Militarism

Twenty five years ago this week, six Jesuit scholars at the Universidad Centroamericana (UCA) in El Salvador opened the doors of their residence to members of a government death squad, who had been armed and trained by the United States. The soldiers marched the priests to the back garden. They were ordered to lie face down. They were shot and killed like dogs along with their housekeeper and her teenage daughter. Father Ignacio Ellacuría Bescoetxea, one of the six Jesuits executed that night, had been a vocal advocate for a negotiated political settlement to the war that had devastated the small Central American country over the course of the decade. On November 16, 1989, Ellacuría would become one of the more than 75,000 killed in the brutal violence carried out by the military dictatorship. The ruling junta was the beneficiary of billions in military aid from the United States government, which they received for their efforts to suppress a populist rebellion by the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). Nine years earlier, Archbishop of San Salvador Oscar Romero had been gunned down at the altar by a death squad member while he was in the middle of celebrating Mass. Before his assassination, Romero had sent a letter to President Jimmy Carter pleading with him to stop sending military aid to the Salvadoran military junta.

Shadowy Tribunal Decides Mining Companies’ Power

September 16, 2014 Alice Ollstein, www.thinkprogress.org Resist! Capitalism, El Salvador, Law, Mining

Does a corporation’s right to profit trump a country’s right to protect its land and water? That was the question today before the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), an obscure tribunal housed within the World Bank in Washington, DC. At a hearing closed to the press and the public, the gold mining company OceanaGold claimed the government of El Salvador owes them hundreds of millions of dollars for denying them a permit to excavate in an ecologically sensitive region. At a rally outside the World Bank Monday, Manuel Pérez-Rocha with the Institute for Policy Studies explained the situation to ThinkProgress: “The $301 million dollars they are demanding is related to the profit-not-made. It’s not that they invested $301 million. They are saying, ‘Well, if you don’t let me operate in your country the way I want, you must pay me for the profits that you prevented me from making.’”

Will World Bank Punish El Salvador For Protecting Its Environment?

September 15, 2014 John Cavanagh and Robin Broad, www.otherwords.org Educate! El Salvador, Energy, Environment, Mining

This summer, we returned to northern El Salvador. That’s where the Pacific Rim mining company started to dig its exploration wells about a decade ago. Near that disputed mining site, local resident Vidalina Morales explained how she and others came to oppose mining: “At first, we thought mining was going to help us out of poverty through jobs.” But, she said, during a visit to a mine in neighboring Honduras, “we saw polluted rivers and people with bad skin diseases, and we learned about the social conflicts that mining brought between those working in the mine and those in the community.”

Politicians On Both Sides Of The Border Dishonest About Migrant Crisis

July 21, 2014 Bruce A. Dixon, www.blackagendareport.com Educate! El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Immigration, Nicaragua

What neither corporate media nor US Latino politicians will point out is that none of the current wave of refugees are coming from Nicaragua, although it has a similar history to Guatemala, Hondruas and El Salvador, and its just as poor. Why? According to NicaNet.Org, a project of the Nicaragua Solidary Committee. . . “The problem of the children migrants is blowback from US policy in the 1980s when our government trained and funded Salvadoran and Guatemalan military and police to prevent popular revolutions and more recently when the US supported the coup against President Manuel Zelaya in Honduras. Those countries were left with brutal, corrupt armies and police forces whereas Nicaragua, with its successful 1979 revolution, got rid of Somoza's brutal National Guard and formed a new army and a new police made up of upstanding citizens.

Salvadoran Farmers Successfully Oppose Monsanto Seeds

July 10, 2014 Dahr Jamail, www.truth-out.org Resist! El Salvador, Food and Agriculture, Monsanto, Policy

Farmers across El Salvador united to block a stipulation in a US aid package to their country that would have indirectly required the purchase of Monsanto genetically modified (GM) seeds. Thousands of farmers, like 45-year-old farmer Juan Joaquin Luna Vides, prefer to source their seeds locally, and not to use Monsanto's GM seeds. "Transnational companies have been known to provide expired seeds that they weren’t able to distribute elsewhere," said Vides, who heads the Diversified Production program at the Mangrove Association, a community development organization that works in the Bajo Lempa region of El Salvador. "We would like the US embassy and the misinformed media outlets [that are pressuring the Salvadoran government to change their procurement procedure] to know more about the reality of national producers and recognize the food sovereignty of the country," he added. During the last two months, the US government has been attempting to pressure the government of El Salvador to sign the second Millennium Challenge Compact with the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), a US foreign aid agency created during the presidency of George W. Bush.

The Fight To Ban Gold Mining And Save El Salvador’s Water Supply

June 30, 2014 Julia Paley, www.fpif.org Resist! El Salvador, Mining, pollution, Water

“For us, the mine is death.” Those words, spoken by the president of a rural grassroots organization, capture the intensity and urgency of the struggle against mining in El Salvador. Mining has reaped devastating consequences in El Salvador. Toxins from mining operations have made 90 percent of El Salvador’s water undrinkable. Lung and kidney diseases run rampant among miners. Community leaders and activists who resist are hounded and cut down. The 15-minute documentary Gold or Water: The Struggle Against Metallic Mining in El Salvador dramatically illustrates Salvadorans’ passionate efforts to ward off mining from aggressive multinational firms. You can watch it in full here: The film focuses on the fight against Pacific Rim, a Canadian/Australian company that seeks to extract gold near the head of the Lempa River, from which nearly 70 percent of El Salvadorans get their water. Opposition is so strong that two successive governments have declared a moratorium on metallic mining. Over 62 percent of the population supports a permanent ban.

New Study Shows Dangers of Trade Agreements that Help Corporations Sue Govenments

March 22, 2014 Robin Broad and John Cavanagh www.triplecrisis.com Educate! El Salvador, Free Trade Agreements, Mining

“Debunking Eight Falsehoods” is a careful refutation of the arguments of a giant Australian/Canadian mining firm, Pacific Rim/OceanaGold, that is suing the government of El Salvador over that government’s decision to stop issuing new mining licenses. The Salvadoran government did this precisely because its citizens deemed the environmental and social costs too high. Pacific Rim’s proposed gold mine was in the fragile and already compromised watershed of the key river that supplies water to over half the country’s people. Pacific Rim/OceanaGold is, according to a 2013 IPS study, one of 31 oil, gas, and mining corporations suing governments in Latin America in the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), based at the World Bank. ICSID is the most frequently used tribunal under existing pro-corporate, anti-democratic trade and investment rules.

El Salvador: Armed Forces Reject Rightwing’s Call To Intervene In Election

March 15, 2014 cispesalexis, www.2014electionsblog.wordpress.com Organize! CISPES, Democracy, El Salvador, Latin America

"On Wednesday March 12, 2014, David Mungía Payes, Minister of Defense,announced at a press conference that the Salvadoran armed forces would respect the outcome of the elections, refuting claims made by ARENA presidential hopeful Norman Quijano that the army was prepared to act to intervene in what ARENA claims are fraudulent elections.Quijano’s statements were made the night of Election Day, when, despite preliminary results that gave the FMLN party the win, he proclaimed himself the next president of El Salvador. Quijano’s words were intended to intimidate the Salvadoran populace given the armed forces’ lengthy history of initiating coup d’etats in El Salvador, as well as waging brutal repression against civilian population. Mungía Payes, however,stated on behalf of the armed forces that they will respect the final election results determined by the Supreme Electoral Tribunal (TSE), and will not be manipulated or used as a threat against the will of the Salvadoran people."

Salvadorian Election Too Close To Call, Rightwing Party “Ready For War”

March 10, 2014 Staff, www.democracynow.org Educate! CISPES, Democracy, El Salvador, Latin America

"Both candidates have claimed victory in El Salvador’s presidential election after a preliminary count showed the vote was too close to call. The race pitted the governing party’s Salvador Sánchez Cerén against the right-wing candidate Norman Quijano. Sánchez Cerén, a former rebel commander, was running to replace Mauricio Funes, marking the first time an FMLNcandidate succeeds another after decades of right-wing governments. Sánchez Cerén was seen as the favorite coming in, but the latest results show him ahead less than 1 percent. We go to El Salvador to speak with Laura Embree-Lowry of CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador."

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