|
A Review of
America’s ‘Investment’ in El Salvador
By Olga Bonfiglio
11/16/07 "Common
Dreams" -- - On
November 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their cook and her
daughter were murdered execution-style by the right-wing
Salvadoran military government. The priests were killed for
teaching their students ideas about liberating themselves from
the oppression of the rich families that owned most of the
country’s wealth. The cook and her daughter were killed because
they were on the premises and potential witnesses to the crime.
The perpetrators were trained at
the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation (WHINSEC),
a.k.a. the School of the Americas where Latin American military
officers learn the latest methods of murder, rape and torture.
Every year since 1990, Father Roy Bourgeois and the
SOA Watch lead
a weekend demonstration outside Fort Benning near Columbus,
Georgia, to demand closure of this U.S. program. The execution
of “the martyrs,” as the Salvadorans call them, finally put an
international spotlight on the ugly civil war that had already
cost 75,000 people their lives, including Archbishop Oscar
Romero on March 24, 1980.
Congressman Joe Moakley
(D-Massachusetts) investigated the situation in El Salvador,
which began a process to end the 12-year civil war-and to reveal
the U.S. government’s role in it as well. Eventually, the United
Nations helped the warring sides to sign a peace agreement in
January 1992.
Here is an eye-witness report of
my visit to El Salvador last November. It illustrates the legacy
of our government’s $6 billion “investment” in that war after 15
years of peace-and provides a sample of what we can expect from
our $1.6 trillion and counting “investment” in Afghanistan and
Iraq.
* * * * *
A shoeless boy wearily weaves
his way down the street, alone, in a limp pair of soiled shorts
and a torn t-shirt. Heaps of trash pile up in the vacant corners
of neighborhoods and on grassy medians on the city’s streets.
Dogs, comprised of many breeds, some of them obviously sick with
disease, listlessly amble through the streets avoiding the path
of a strutting rooster or a mother hen with her perky and
curious chicks.
A shabby, dazed, young man
slumps on his rump over one of the benches of a busy community
laundry. As the women scrub their family’s clothes or those
they’ve put out for hire, the man cuddles a greasy, white,
plastic canister of glue with his nose stuck down deep in it as
much as his face will allow.
Two men with sawed-off shotguns
stand in front of a Burger King. The police, who work long,
boring hours and lack the public’s respect, are unable to
guarantee order consistently so business owners hire private
guards to protect themselves, their customers, and their
property.
Even on Saturdays the young
women of the sweatshop factories, the maquiladoras, rouse
themselves to report to work at 6 a.m. where they will spend the
next 14 hours sewing fashion clothing soon be sold in stores all
over the United States.
It’s dark at 6 p.m. in November
and by 8 the streets of La Chacra, one of the poorest
neighborhoods in the capital city of San Salvador, are deserted
because the 30,000 residents close up their shops and lock the
doors of their homes in order to secure themselves against the
vagrancies of warring youth gangs with guns and drugs.
The polluted Rio Acelhuate runs
through La Chacra but the kids who play in it and their families
who use it for watering animals lack an understanding of basic
public health principles. This means that they typically suffer
physical ailments from their poverty: dermatitis and fungus
(skin diseases caused by wet feet and close contact with
garbage), gastro-intestinal conditions (from parasites),
diabetes, arthritis, and hypertension.
It’s easy to see why upper
respiratory diseases are so prevalent in the city. A thick,
black cloud constantly hovers over the city due to all the
diesel emissions of cars and especially the buses. At rush hour
you can hardly breathe the air it is so polluted. Even the rain
offers no relief and summer must be awful when the seamy, humid
tropical air adds to this noxious soup.
While most Salvadorans obtain a
sixth grade education, one of the lowest rates in the world,
only 50 percent complete the ninth grade and 25 percent make it
through high school. Unemployment or underemployment in the
country is about 50 percent and the illiteracy rate stands at
60-70 percent. Most of the elderly cannot read. Consequently,
education is highly valued and desperately needed to help this
country improve its future economic and social outlook.
High school graduates in El
Salvador have a chance to get jobs in shops and offices. If they
go on to the university, they can be teachers, translators,
businesspeople, health care workers, doctors, lawyers,
professors, priests-and middle class parents.
Students realize that they are
the future of El Salvador, however, they also know that without
an education they will go nowhere. So they make the necessary
sacrifices. Some of them take three buses to get to school. Most
work during the day and study late at night while their
parents-and sometimes their extended family-have two and three
jobs at low pay to help their children obtain an education.
With a national population of
nearly 7 million, it’s estimated that hundreds of Salvadorans
struggle to cross into El Norte to join over 2 million of their
countrymen who are already here. They are the ones who wash
dishes, wait tables, and clean toilets in American cities,
slaughter and slice carcasses at the meat packing plants of the
Midwest, or perform endless hours of stoop labor as migrant farm
workers in the Southwest, Florida, New York and Michigan.
In a recent study by the
University of Central America in San Salvador, 42 percent of
Salvadorans said they would leave their country to go to the
United States if they had the chance. These people, who make
$1-3 per day, are so desperate to feed their families that they
are willing to risk a crossing. Some pay $6,000-7,000 for a
coyote’s help, which requires a 50 percent down payment and must
be paid back within three years at 20 percent interest. To raise
this money, they put up their land, farm and house as
collateral. When they finally make it to the United States
(sometimes it takes two or three tries), all members of the
family from both sides of the border face being separated from
each other for unknown periods of time.
The current right-wing ARENA
government denies that the country has a poverty problem; it
wants the country to look good after getting such bad press
during the 1980’s war. It also makes a lot of promises to
improve health and education but then fails to follow through.
Consequently, funds that poured in from abroad during and since
those terrible war years are drying up as needs elsewhere in the
world take priority.
Before the war started in 1980,
14 families of El Salvador owned most of the country’s wealth.
Now the remaining eight families are privatizing the country’s
resources and making trade agreements like the Central American
Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), which greatly advantages U.S.
corporations.
President Bush’s call for a
Coalition of the Willing in 2003 yielded only El Salvador’s
participation from Latin America despite negative public
opinion, according to the
Council on
Hemispheric Affairs. (Nicaragua, Honduras and the Dominican
Republic sent a small number of troops at the beginning of the
war but pulled them out in spring 2004.) Of the 1300 Salvadoran
troops sent, five have been killed. Last March when President
Bush visited Latin America, he didn’t even bother to stop by in
El Salvador to thank them for their service.
Olga Bonfiglio is a professor
at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and author of
Heroes of a Different Stripe: How One Town Responded to the War
in Iraq. She has written for several national magazines on
the subjects of social justice and religion. Her website is
www.OlgaBonfiglio.com.
Contact her at
olgabonfiglio@yahoo.com.
Click on "comments" below to read or post comments
Comment Guidelines
Be succinct, constructive and
relevant to the story.
We encourage engaging, diverse
and meaningful commentary. Do not include
personal information such as names, addresses,
phone numbers and emails. Comments falling
outside our guidelines – those including
personal attacks and profanity – are not
permitted.
See our complete
Comment Policy
and
use this link to notify us if you have concerns
about a comment.
We’ll promptly review and remove any
inappropriate postings.
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
