El Salvador

2019 Latin America In Review: Year Of The Revolt of the Dispossessed

December 15, 2019 Roger Harris, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) Educate! Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Latin America, Mexico, Nicaragua, Puerto Rico, Venezuela

A year ago, John Bolton, Trump’s short-lived national security advisor, invoked the 1823 Monroe Doctrine making explicit what has long been painfully implicit: the dominions south of the Rio Grande are the empire’s “backyard.” Yet 2019 was a year best characterized as the revolt of the dispossessed for a better world against the barbarism of neoliberalism. As Rafael Correa points out, Latin America today is in dispute. What follows is a briefing on this crossroads.

Salvadorans Protest Renewed Attempts To Privatize Water Resources

July 10, 2018 By Pedro Cabezas, Inequality.org Resist! El Salvador, Privatization, Protests, Water

Barely six weeks have passed since the newly elected, right wing-dominated legislature took office in El Salvador, but recent frictions between security personnel of the legislature and university students protesting the potential privatization of water already paint a grim picture of things to come for social movements. During the month of May, parliamentarians moved to ratify the mining prohibition approved in March 2016 and to shelve all pending requests related to the mining file. At the same time, the Environment and Climate Change Commission, ECCC, moved to reopen a long overdue discussion on water legislation, hinting at the possibility of privatization. Since 2006, environmental organizations in El Salvador have pressured lawmakers to approve laws that recognize water as a human right and as a common good that should be publicly managed, with a focus on sustainability, accessible domestic use, and regulation of commercial and industrial use.

Trump Ends TPS For 200,000 Salvadorans Seeking Sanctuary

January 9, 2018 By Molly Olmstead, Slate.com Resist! El Salvador, Immigration, Trump Administration

The Trump administration announced Monday it was ending a humanitarian program that allowed nearly 200,000 Salvadorans who fled catastrophic conditions in their home country to remain in the country legally. The program, Temporary Protected Status, was first opened up to Salvadorans—the largest group to benefit from the program—in 2001 after two earthquakes devastated the country and killed more than 1,000 people. The program was repeatedly extended through the Bush and Obama administrations as violence, fueled by gangs, made returning to the country alarmingly dangerous. The danger remains, but the Trump administration has argued that the program was never intended to last as long as it has. The administration has already rescinded the protections for the 59,000 Haitians who arrived after the 2010 earthquake and a couple thousand Nicaraguans.

Dominican Republic, Haiti & El Salvador Reject US Threats

April 3, 2017 Sergio Alejandro Gómez, www.en.granma.cu Resist! Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, US Foreign Policy, US Imperialism

By Sergio Alejandro Gómez for Granma - Rubio directly threatened the governments of the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, and Haiti, and in an interview with El Nuevo Herald, stating that the vote of these countries at the meeting on Venezuela of the OAS Permanent Council could have repercussions on economic assistance provided by the United States. Certain politicians strolling through the U.S. Capitol in Washington - the first bricks of which were laid at the time of the Haitian Revolution - still believe that Latin America and the Caribbean is the backyard that the United States must “put in order” from time to time. One such advocate of this obsolete U.S. ideology today is Marco Rubio...

El Salvador Ruling Offers A Reminder Of Why TPP Must Be Defeated

October 22, 2016 Robin Broad and John Cavanagh, www.thenation.com Educate! El Salvador, TPP

By Robin Broad and John Cavanagh for The Nation - If you needed one more reason to take sides in the last great fight of the Obama years, that of the corporate giveaway package known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), here it is. Last week, the tribunal at the center of the proposed TPP ruled against a global mining firm that sued El Salvador, but only after seven years of deliberations and over $12 million spent by the government of El Salvador.

The US Returns To Latin America

April 17, 2016 Vijay Prashad, www.counterpunch.org Educate! Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Ecuador, El Salvador, Honduras, Imperialism, Latin America, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela

By Vijay Prashad for the Hindu and Counterpunch. The financial crisis of 2007-08 dented China’s economy and saw the slow deterioration of commodity prices. It took a few years for the economic impact to strike Latin America with ferocity. A sharp tumble in oil prices in the summer of 2008 put the brakes on many of the social programmes that had become essential to the Bolivarian dynamic. It signalled the weakness in the experiment against Western domination. President Barack Obama’s administration focussed intently on Latin America. Opportunity struck with the 2009 coup in Honduras against the Left-wing government of Manuel Zelaya. Mr. Obama recognised the new military-backed government. It opened the door to a more aggressive stance vis-à-vis Latin American states. The presidency of Peru’s Ollanta Humala (2011) and the second presidency of Chile’s Michelle Bachelet (2014) — both ostensibly of the Left — hastily drew in cabinet members vetted by the bankers and made their peace with the hegemony of the U.S. Chávez’s death in 2012 meant that the Bolivarians lost their most charismatic champion. The impact of the Honduran coup and Chávez’s death had made itself felt along the spine of Latin America. The U.S., it was being said, is back.

Trial For Four Who Support 17 Women Imprisoned In El Salvador

May 17, 2015 Staff, www.PopularResistance.org Resist! Abortion, Criminal Justice and Prisons, El Salvador

Four activists, who appeared in court on May 15th for a pre-trial status hearing, will have to return to Washington, DC on July 7, 2015 to stand trial on the charge of unlawful entry, which carries a maximum sentence of 6 months in prison. The four were arrested on April 24, 2015 at the Embassy of El Salvador where they staged a sit-in to call attention to 17 Salvadoran women currently serving extreme 30-year prison sentences for having had miscarriages. The charges are for aggravated homicide and receiving illegal abortions, though there is little to no evidence as to the causes of their miscarriages. Carmen Guadalupe Vásquez Aldana made international headlines last month as the first of the 17 to be released. "This is a grave injustice. Where there is injustice, silence is complicity," said Father Roy Bourgeois.

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.”

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