Grit and Grace

Guest Blog. El Salvador: A Gospel that Unsettles

2012-01-30T20:43:00.000-08:00

Elizabeth (center, navy t-shirt), graduate student Monica (Left, blue t-shirt) and our host family in Guarjila share a playful evening in their home. Lucinda is at left in an orange shirt.

Below, you find a gift of words. They are from a friend, Elizabeth Coyle.

Elizabeth works in Campus Ministry at the University of San Diego, and she coordinated a delegation of undergraduate-and-graduate students which I recently accompanied as an interpreter. It is an honor for me to pass her lovely memories and wise analysis on to you. People like you, Elizabeth (and you, reader) are all the proof I need to trust that we are changing this world, one day at a time.

January 2012

As most of you know, I returned one week ago from El Salvador, where I was leading an 11-day immersion trip for college students at USD. When we were leaving Guarjila, the rural village where we stayed in humble homes with families of the community, our host moms commissioned us with the task of sharing their stories. We were asked to share with North Americans not only the suffering but also the joy of the Salvadoran people. Truly, I could write an entire book, or at least a book of poetry, in honor of these resilient women. But in this moment, I can only invite you into a couple of my haunting memories.

El Salvador suffered from a 12-year civil war, from 1980-1992, a war in which the repressive, ruling military was funded by the US government at a cost of about 1 million tax dollars every day. $1,000,000 every day for 12 years. The UN Truth Commission, following the war, documented that 95% of the human rights abuses of the war were committed by this military, members of which trained at Ft. Bennings, Georgia. We had the extreme honor of hearing about these abuses from 3 women of COMADRES, women who told me that there cannot be real peace in El Salvador until there is justice done.

They told us of their own kidnapping, rape, and subsequent torture because of their work for human rights - torture by electrification, extreme heat and cold, sexual indignity, and broken bones. Yet despite the atrocities, I will most remember their shaking heads even before one student could finish the question: "did you ever doubt God's presence?" These women model for me the words of Oscar Romero: "Those who put their faith in the Risen One and work for a world more just, who protest against the injustices of the present system...all those who begin their struggle with the resurrection of the Great Liberator - they alone are authentic Christians." Which leaves me with the question: am I?

And then there was Guarjila, a town out in the campo where I was more likely to see a live rooster wandering around the kitchen than running water from a tap. I had to get over my great phobia of birds pretty quickly when the chicken at my feet during breakfast might sit on my plate at dinner. The strong people of Guarjila had lived through the civil war, almost every one of the middle-aged and elderly showing visible scars, disfigurement, or psychological distress. My host mother, Lucinda, was no exception.

She was the matriarch of my household, grinding corn at the local mill every morning to make handmade tortillas for her elderly parents, daughter and son-in-law, 3 grandchildren, niece, great-niece, and youngest son. Her other son had died from disease at the age of 1. Her niece's husband is working, undocumented, in Tennessee. Small wonder. Over 20% of El Salvador's GDP is remittances from the USA.

Not 10 minutes after meeting Lucinda, I asked her a seemingly simple question (my Spanish wouldn't allow much more): how long have you lived here? And then Lucinda shared, and shared, and shared. A part of me wanted to stop her, to explain that my limited Spanish wasn't catching half of what she said. But by then she was using words I did know, words like hunger, thirst, bombs, and running. She motioned on her own body the act of cutting someone up into little pieces, and the act of shooting someone in the head. And when her eyes looked directly into my own, I thought my soul might explode, or overflow into every part of my life that wanted to retain the status quo. At that moment, I could only be a vessel, a well, a space to store the pain. I always want to do something about suffering, but in that moment I was called to just be with it.

It was hard to believe that this was the same woman who later guided me across the Sumpul river while I slipped and fell, as we spent our last day swimming. And this was the woman whose grandchildren buried her up to her head in sand while she laughed. And the woman who bought me a coke, and taught me how to fry plantains, and held my hand, and apparently cussed like a sailor (my Spanish wasn't good enough to catch it). Romero says that "human beings are God's other self." I guess this means that God is still persecuted today in El Salvador by hunger, disease, memories of war, and the economic violence that is of our making, even as God is the hope of children dancing, women sewing, and men on the migrant trail north.

I don't come home from El Salvador with a pretty package for social change, nor do I feel authorized to evangelize anything that I can manufacture. I only know what I have seen and felt and heard: that the cross is not 2000 years ago, that Christ did not ascend forever into the clouds. Christ is suffering today, Christ is crucified by unfeeling capitalism, militarism, and apathy. But if the crucifixion is today, so is the resurrection. And I get the feeling that if I ever want to live, I need to side with those who are dying. Like the martyred Oscar Romero, I want my heart to always lie with the poor.

I'll end now, before I really get going. The last night in El Salvador, all 13 students and I shared poems that we had written during our time there. Here's mine:

God (in the present context)

There is a room in my heart, waiting for me.

In that room, my hurt sits with God.

If I hold out my hand, then I am ready

To walk there with you

Because I've realized my heart cannot beat alone.

El pueblo lives there in this room,

And everyone is me,

Or maybe everyone is you.

One daughter disappeared and has since been found,

But this room in my heart is a waiting room

Where most families still

Pray for their prodigal sons.

A woman writes freedom on her tattooed heart,

Her voice expanding beyond the

Violent bars of repression.

And while children play with corrugated tin

And dance and sing and draw,

Women speak dry-eyed of war wounds

And scars that spell the name of God.

And there's holy laughter that bounces and echoes

And becomes folk music of revolution.

Thank you, sister. Thank you, brother

For reminding me that the

Room in my heart lets in light and hope

Through the cracked lines of pain.

Thank you, heart, for listening to this song.

And my heart sits in the heart of God.

Thanks to Salvadorans, my heart is cracked open in one thousand ways, and I pray that it never closes. And thanks to you, patient reader(!), for allowing me to honor the request of the women of Guarjila. They share with you their joy.

With paz y amor,

Elizabeth

Threats and Violence Continue against Salvadoran Environmentalists

2012-01-25T12:49:00.000-08:00

From left, David Pereira, Fr. Neftali Ruiz, and Bishop Mnsr. Francisco Sol give declarations at the press conference of January 24, 2012. Photo credit: Alfredo Carias
Also published on UpsideDown World.

Theodora Simon and Danielle Mackey
January 25, 2012
San Salvador

Violence and intimidation continue in El Salvador against environmental activists and defenders of human rights who have publically opposed metallic mining. The latest round of threats was focused against a Salvadoran Catholic priest, Father Neftalí Ruiz, and a community radio station, Radio Victoria.

Fr. Ruiz, the Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Cabañas Environmental Committee and a member of the National Working Group against Metallic Mining (“The Mesa,”) was attacked on January 20^th, when he opened his home to a group of supposed university students who had expressed interest in his work. The two young people then tied him up at gunpoint and proceeded to search the files on his computer. They left the home with the computer and media storage devices, but did not take anything else of value. The young men stated numerous times during the assault that they were looking for information and made several calls to a third party while searching the computer to report their findings.

Environmentalists detailed the events and their evaluations of the continuing violence against the community at a press conference held by the Mesa on Tuesday, January 24th “These acts are meant to intimidate us so as to weaken our resistance,” emphasized David Pereira of the Investment and Commerce Investigation Center (CEICOM).

Alluding to past cases in which the Attorney General and police have blamed cases of death threats and violence against activists on common delinquency, gang violence or interpersonal conflict, Father Ruiz declared that he knows no one with a motive to hurt him for any such reason. “The only work I do is to defend Mother Nature, to preach the Gospel, and denounce injustices.”

In the five murder cases to have hit the environmentalist community, material authors were quickly rounded up and prosecuted, but there exists significant evidence to suggest that they were hired assassins. In the most recent death, in which an environmentalist college student named Juan Francisco Duran Ayala was executed on a community basketball court, Fr. Ruiz served as a spokesperson at the exhumation of the young man’s cadaver. In none of the cases of aggression against the community — which the community fears will not end with last week’s attack on Fr. Ruiz — have intellectual authors been identified by the authorities.

The robbery and attack on Fr. Neftali is not the only recent case of violence and intimidation against defenders of human rights: members of Radio Victoria in Cabañas are also receiving a wave of death threats via email. Radio staff, who have been adamant in defending human and environmental rights through their work in community media, have also been subjected to multiple rounds of death threats throughout the past few years. According to the press release published by the Mesa, this latest round seems to be connected to party politics. “Last week the mayor of Victoria put up a large ARENA party flag in the middle of Santa Marta, which made a lot of people angry because of past history; ARENA's connections to death squads, military force and repression as well as implementing policies that favored big businesses and the wealthy elite during the 20 years they ran the government,” explained radio founder Cristina Starr in an email to radio supporters last week.

A few days after three bus-loads of residents of Santa Marta protested in Victoria, Radio staff began to again receive threats via email and nocturnal visits to their remote rural homes. “You all can imagine how this wears on us,” Starr wrote. “Radio members cannot go and stay in their homes, they cannot be with their families and they always have to be wary and careful wherever they go and whatever they do.”

There is concern among the environmentalist community that the pattern of superficial investigation will hold true with these most recent cases as well. “We are demanding that the Attorney General of the Republic and the PNC (Civilian National Police) investigate (these cases) seriously. I say ‘seriously’ because there have been other attacks and even assassinations with which we’re unsatisfied with the investigation results presented by the Attorney General,” explained Pereira. The concerns of the activists are substantiated by the outputs of the Salvadoran justice system: a United Nations Development Program report from 2007 found that only 14% of cases enter the judicial system, and only 3.8% are ever fully prosecuted, with the guilty party brought to justice.

Members of the press listen as Ruiz, Pereira and Sol give declarations. Photo credit: Alfredo Carias

Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes recently asked for forgiveness for past human rights atrocities and called for a “peace with justice,” during the recent celebration of the 20^th anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords that ended the Salvadoran Civil War. The cases of Fr. Ruiz and Radio Victoria present continuing human rights violations left stagnant in this country’s current justice system. The environmentalist community believes that this situation leaves human rights defenders vulnerable. “We have shown that in our country, it is a crime to defend the interests of the vast majority,” manifested Catholic Bishop Monsignor Francisco Sol in yesterday’s press conference.

As they continue to resist metallic mining and promote human rights despite the threatening climate, activists question how long the impunity will reign. “I ask the National Civilian Police and the Attorney General, what are they going to do in this case? Since 2008…I have reported death threats,” expressed Fr. Neftali in yesterday’s press conference. “What are they waiting for? For there to be more deaths, more bloodshed?”

CRIPDES and the National Working Table against Metallic Mining Denounce New Acts of Aggression

2012-01-24T18:38:00.000-08:00

(The following is an English translation of the press release distributed today, January 24, 2012, by the National Working Table against Metalic Mining in El Salvador. The most recent victim in the anti-mining environmentalist struggle in El Salvador is Fr. Neftali Ruiz, a Catholic priest who also served as the spokesperson at the exhumation of the cadaver of Juan Francisco Duran Ayala, an assassinated college student and member of the environmentalist community. Today's press release was accompanied by a a press conference; see Part 1 here and part 2 here. Document translated by Theodora Simon and Danielle Mackey.)

Last Friday around noon, Father Neftalí Ruiz, priest in the Salvadoran Catholic Church, Secretary of the Board of Directors of the Cabañas Environmental Committee, and member of the National Working Group against Metallic Mining, was victim of thieves passing themselves off as university students. They stole his personal computer, cell phone and media storage devices.

The criminals entered his house declaring that they were interested in Father Neftalí's social work and the organizations he works with. They then tied him up and proceeded to strip him of his belongings.

This latest attempt on the life, integrity and work of the Cabañas Environmental Committee and the National Working Group against Metallic Mining forces us to, once again, express our strong rejection of and condemn the wave of persecution against environmental activists and defenders of human rights, including Father Neftalí. They have faced similar harassment since the beginning of the anti-mining struggle in El Salvador. In recent days, colleagues from the Radio Victoria in Cabañas have once again suffered from death threats and have been the target of messages that promote violence and intolerance against this important media outlet. These new attacks appear to be rooted strictly in party politics, but also demonstrate the social tension that exists in communities that have opposed metallic mining.

The anti-mining struggle in El Salvador and the defense of human rights against metallic mining has generated social conflicts without precedent and the assassination of four environmentalists and activists. Dora Sorto, Ramiro Rivera and Marcelo Rivera, assassinated in 2009, were assassinated in conditions that the Human Rights Ombudsman has labeled as characteristic of death squad activity. Our peers have been victims of threats, persecution and lightning operations that remain in impunity. The Attorney General of the Republic and the National Civilian Police have not assured the rights of the families and the victims to prompt and clear justice

As the National Working Group against Metallic Mining, in the framework of the commemoration of new institutionalism that began with the Peace Accords, we make a clear call to state authorities to fulfill their duties to provide constitutional guarantees to the citizens of this country. We demand that the Attorney General of the Republic investigate and bring to justice those who are guilty for these and other violent acts committed against anti-mining activists. We also unite with the Environmental Committee of Cabañas to demand that the Civilian National Police protects the lives of its members and of the people of the communities that live in permanent social conflict caused by the presence of mining projects.

To the Salvadoran population in general, the social organizations and the international community that accompanies the struggle against metallic mining projects in our country, we express that our struggle is not a crime: our cause is in favor of life, health, the environment and the sustainability of our country. The State, through its institutions, should assure that in this country an industry of this type is never permitted, and additionally it should assure that the citizens’ rejections against these extractive projects is not a motive for persecution, threats or death. We roundly condemn the violent acts committed against Fr. Neftalí Ruiz, and against other anti-mining activists. We say with even greater conviction:

NO TO METALLIC MINING IN EL SALVADOR. YES TO LIFE.

San Salvador, January 23, 2012

www.esnomineria.blogspot.com

The Poem Ends in Murder

2011-12-10T14:12:00.000-08:00

Reflections on Interconnectedness, and the Importance of Sharing our Stories
Danielle Mackey
October 2011
Originally published on the Peace X Peace "Voices From the Frontlines" blog.

It began with a poetry game. The Salvadoran teenagers, ranging in age from 13 to 17, sat in my classroom number 202 for Conversational English. The air conditioning was on full-blast and the desks were in five rows of five and we were all pretty giggly. Each student jotted down her line and jetted it backward to the student seated directly behind, who did the same. I invited the last student in each row to read the resulting hodge-podge of poetry lines. One young man started with his group’s piece, which began with a silly image of soda raining from the sky, suddenly turned into an unexpected meeting with an effeminate gay man on the street, and then morphed into a homophobic tirade which ended in the murder of the gay by-passer. A mere ten minutes earlier, the class had been in the thick of a conversation about violence in El Salvador, and the important role that youth play in making this country a place they want to live. Ten minutes ago they were filled with ideas about how they could create peace: practice a religion or a sport, for instance. Respect others, they said. I found myself cascading down from the high of seeing tomorrow’s leaders light up on empowerment, and slamming against the brute force of laughter about a joke whose punchline I didn’t share, to say the least.

In my day-to-day schedule as a teacher and journalist in San Salvador I interact with people who have myriad experiences and viewpoints. Generally speaking, however, life in El Salvador is extreme in its poverty and population density and homicide rate, which together tend to produce extreme points of view. This is especially true when it comes to “normal” vs. “different” –or, to put those terms in the way that people seem to mean them, “right” vs. “wrong.” It isn’t unusual to hear adults on the streets or in the media declaring the sentiments that my youth expressed as a crude joke. And the LGBT population is only one social whipping boy: materially impoverished people, young people in gangs, women who defy feminine stereotypes, and people who have skin that is dark brown or black often find themselves the main character in everything from a dehumanizing joke to a dirty look to a discriminatory government policy. Sometimes people pay the ultimate price for their difference, which was the case for the 12- and-14-year-old boys in a community where my friend works; they left school two days ago and were kidnapped and assassinated. (Their “difference” is their identity as young men in a marginalized community, where they’re always at the barrel-end of a gun, whether held by police or by gang members.) It was also the case in the torture and murder of 17 transgender women within the first 7 months of the year 2009.

But I have spent three years hearing these extremes volleyed about, and thus my students’ bloody imaginations weren’t what most surprised me. What caught my breath was the endless chasm between their fire to build a beautiful world and their fire to banish particular people from it. I tried to mentally pause on the memory of their faces as they talked about a peaceful El Salvador: They genuinely want something good. Then I attempted to juxtapose that alongside their display of sexist homophobia. I could have used another long while to take the next step: to push myself into a critical reflection of my own unfair judgments, which I have “learned” throughout my experiences in life, and which have a similar alienating end. But in that moment, the class had to go on.

My students are — like myself and like most people in this world — unable to accurately use the words “I am” as a descriptor. We are all living a constant becoming. I try to remember this as the emotions of their occasional discriminatory comments rush red into my face. We act on information we’ve gathered from our lived experiences, which makes perceptions understandable, even if they’re absolutely deplorable at their worst. Furthermore, we too often forget to consider how pieces of the human condition inextricably connect us all. Even the fact that we all learn from where and how we live is universal. In that sense, my students were essentially laying the groundwork for me to give them a new experience —something to widen them, to encourage reflection about their assumptions, and hopefully to welcome them into a fuller awareness of the fact that they belong to a shared humanity. To spit a few slapping words about their “ignorance” would have disregarded what I believe about our journeys, and our responsibilities to be present to and witness for each other. It would have been tantamount to a self-reproach, given our interconnectedness.

Unfortunately, there are days when those angry words wriggle beyond my control and slip out. As a lesbian and a woman, this moment with my students unleashed the baying of the inner bulldog reverberating loudly in my head. I was on the verge of spilling over. Over time, I have found that my best preparation for handling these moments is in meditation and writing. I meditate on the people in my life; on their unique energies, on how they empower and challenge me. I bear witness to our shared experiences, our collective story, through my writing. I believe that our stories are as sacred and essential to our understanding of human nature as Watson and Crick’s DNA.

Today, I meditate on my students. I call upon this deep space within us all where we are identical and lovely beyond imagination. I push myself to stay open to and learn from others. I choose to use that moment with my students — which I hated at the time — to try to grow in my understanding of human nature, and to focus on how this young, foreign lesbian woman is a vital part of building a world of peace. I take a deep breath. I question them in that post-poem moment: “Students, you were just talking about your dream of a peaceful El Salvador, and now this?” Silence. Perhaps a widening. Perhaps the future lines that my students write will also be influenced by the story we lived that day.

(All photos original. Photo 1: Street corner in downtown San Salvador, March 2006. Photo 2: Iglesia Rosario, downtown San Salvador, March 2006. Photo 3: The city as viewed from Los Planes de Renderos, 2006.)

Transnational Movement "Encachimbados" Brings Occupy Protests to El Salvador

2011-11-28T12:49:00.002-08:00

(Originally published on UpsideDown World. Images courtesy of photographer Rachel Heidenry.)

San Salvador The world-wide Occupy Movement arrived to El Salvador on Thanksgiving Day, as a transnational protest in front of the United States Embassy. The movement has designated itself “Los Encachimbados,” which is a colloquial Salvadoran word meaning “indignant.” About 70 people gathered, roughly half Salvadoran and half U.S. citizens.

The group distributed a press release delineating the local context of damage that they believe to be caused by the current international economic system. They call the attention of both the U.S. and Salvadoran governments to the free trade model, regional militarization strategies, and environmental destruction and climate change—all policies that the Encachimbados see as designed by a transnational elite, and which result in a low quality of life for the majority of the population of the Americas. “People all over the world are tired of these economic and political policies that benefit only 1% of our world. We’re here in front of the U.S. Embassy because no world-wide change can be generated if the U.S. doesn’t change, too,” explains Alfredo Carias, a Salvadoran Encachimbados spokesperson.

The free trade model between Central America and its northern neighbor “is pushing Central American producers out of the market, now that local companies are having to compete directly against U.S. firms without protections, and it has also caused decreased environmental and labor regulations,” says Daniel Burridge, an Encachimbados spokesperson, U.S. citizen and resident of El Salvador. “In the end, the poor and the environment are the ones footing the bill.”

The privileges granted to foreign companies through the active free trade agreement that bonds El Salvador and the United States, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA,) has recently yielded a torrid legal battle. The Salvadoran government faces two lawsuits for a total of almost $200 million for refusing to grant permissions for the companies to carry out open-pit metallic mining in several regions throughout the country. (One of the two cases is still in arbitration; the other is in appeal.)

Surrounding the legal battle is a series of assassinations of four environmental activists, all part of the anti-mining movement. Despite the violence, activists maintain pressure on the Salvadoran government to pass a law banning metallic mineral mining. “I live in a country subject to free trade agreements where mining companies can arrive, rob the few resources that we have, and leave our land contaminated and suffering. I’m here today because I dream of real social change for my country,” explains nineteen year-old Salvadoran citizen and Encachimbados participant, “Lorena.”

The militarization strategies embraced by the U.S. and Salvadoran governments, according to the Encachimbados’ press release, “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.” Two days prior to the Encachimbados protest, in a move that many qualify as a militaristic violation of the Salvadoran Peace Accords, President Mauricio Funes swore in a new Minister of Security and Justice, the retired army general David Munguía Payés. Evidence published by the El Faro newspaper reveals that the firing of the previous minister and the selection of a retired army general to replace him was a decision made under pressure from the U.S. government. This has led others to criticize the decision as a violation of Salvadoran state sovereignty.

The military has played a large role in the daily lives of Salvadoran citizens since 2009, when President Funes deployed the army to patrol alongside the Civilian National Police force in especially violent zones around the country. Many civil society organizations have decried this decision as unconstitutional, and have noted that it follows the tone set by the U.S.-funded Merida Plan, which presses for militarized public security policies for the treatment of common delinquency, gang activity, and drug trafficking. However, troop deployment has not decreased the homicide rate in El Salvador, which has held steady at 12 assassinations daily. “Soldiers have no ability to make arrests or bring charges against anyone; the fact is that they really are for intimidation purposes,” explains Burridge, who also works in social services in a marginalized urban neighborhood known as La Chacra. In fact, within the first fifteen months of the new policy, the Human Rights Ombudsman received 158 formal reports of human rights violations against the civilian population by patrolling soldiers.

Though a brutal civil war ended about two decades ago, the legacy of violence and militarism continues to plague El Salvador, and in 2009, it was classified by the Geneva Declaration on Armed Violence and Development as the most violent nation in the world. The Encachimbados movement stresses that the militaristic policies fashioned by the transnational elite foment the daily violence that haunts Salvadorans. “We’re here today in front of the U.S. Embassy because the U.S. is largely responsible for the problems we face here,” explains U.S. citizen and Salvadoran resident, Christine Damon. “For instance, I work in youth security. The U.S War on Drugs and export of small and large arms is directly contributing to the deaths of the twelve mostly-young men who die daily here. Furthermore, the 1% is not interested in changing this reality. It’s convenient for youth to be in poverty, to be excluded, to not be paying attention. I’m here… because I question this reality.” Damon, who holds the hand of her 8 year old son as she speaks, adds, “I want him to grow up in a safer world. Until there is a more just distribution of resources, that simply will not happen.”

The Encachimbados movement cites its third major concern as environmental destruction and climate change. El Salvador is classified as the most vulnerable country in the world to natural disasters, “but the amount of greenhouse gases that it emits is almost nothing, whereas one-third of greenhouse gases worldwide are emitted by the US,” explains Burridge. While carbon emissions continue to wreak havoc in vulnerable places like Central America, he continues, “the U.S. also continues to block meaningful action to regulate greenhouse gases.” Tropical Depression 12-E recently swept through Central America, dumping record amounts of rain on El Salvador and causing 34 deaths, 50,000 evacuations, and an estimated $840 million of losses in infrastructure and agriculture.

The Encachimbados participants emphasize that they are part of a worldwide transnational social movement, coming together to cast an analytical eye on the status quo for the majority world population and to posit alternatives. “Our capitalist system classifies human beings as a means to profit, and this has us enslaved,” argues Eric Rivera, a 23 year old Salvadoran journalism student. “Our economic system oppresses us psychologically, spiritually, in our private lives, in our professional lives. We have to propose a new form of life; one that is based on solidarity, mutual support between people, and one which is organized horizontally,” To his left, another voice chimes in: “I want a world that’s not so centered on consumerism. I want our focus to be on recognition of each other as human beings,” muses 20 year old electrical engineering student Marvin Marmol.

The Encachimbados’ Thanksgiving Day appearance was the beginning of a growing movement in El Salvador. “We will be permanently mobilized to build a global system that tries to promote the interests of the 99% of humanity and the interests of the Mother Earth,” says Burridge. “Be on the lookout for us in the future.”

Two Cemeteries in the Sunlight.

2011-09-05T20:51:00.000-07:00

A juxtaposition of two deaths in the Global North and South, and what that means for spirituality.

(This reflection was originally written for and published by the SPEAK blog [Spiritual Practice Engaging in Activism and Knowledge], run by the wonderful folks of Programa Velasco, specifically Annie Boyd and Zena Andreani. September 2011.)

I recently flew home from my life in El Salvador to attend my maternal grandfather’s funeral in Des Moines, Iowa. My family has almost always lived in Des Moines. It is where my grandfather, Elmore Weldon “Bud” Steffen, grew up, raised my mom and her siblings after shipping home from World War II, graduated from college and worked through two sales jobs that together constituted his entire career. It’s where he retired to babysit his grandchildren and his Collie dog, and peacefully spent the last years of his life in a grassy Catholic assisted-living facility. Monthly Social Security and Medicare payments aided him financially in his transition from a boisterous middle age to older years of advancing Emphysema, so he never had to lean financially on his children, who were tied up raising kids of their own. Of course, Grandpa had some personal anomalies peppered throughout this otherwise seamless portrait of the life of a World War II veteran. (According to the stories at his funeral, these generally involved scotch and fancy rental cars.) But to put it in a generalized swath, Grandpa Bud was in life the man who the presiding funeral priest described after his death: “A man of peaceful piety.” He was a thoughtful, hard-working, confident and loving man who was devoted to his spirituality, his country, and his family. As might be expected, his funeral was a cherished time of equal parts laughter and tears.

Two months prior to Grandpa Bud’s funeral was the last time I was involved with a burial. Without meaning any disrespect to my family, I couldn’t keep from comparing Grandpa’s life and death to this previous event, which involved a man who I never even met. Perhaps it was impossible for me to refrain from juxtaposing the two because of the extreme differences between them. Perhaps it was because my years in El Salvador are teaching me just what a blessed and truly uncommon life my grandfather led. In any event, the mental and emotional juggle led me deeper into the lifelong search for answers to some of the most basic questions about life, suffering, and spirituality.

We were in a public cemetery near downtown San Salvador: a patchwork group of some 40 members of the press, government authorities and the activist community, along with half a dozen family members of the deceased. We had gathered to witness the unearthing of the body of a 30 year old college student who had been executed on a community basketball court while on his way to class. Juan Francisco Duran Ayala was the latest victim in a string of assassinations to hit the anti-mining activist community in El Salvador, and he had been buried in an anonymous plot when the police found no identification on the body. His family was charged with formally identifying his body on this day. Cemetery workers covered in white astronaut-like suits shoveled at the public pit, and even at our 40-some feet of respectful distance, the overpowering smell of decomposition announced that they had found him.

Juan Francisco was pulled out of the ground by four men with two ropes, one cradling him around the back of his neck, and the other behind his bent knees. As careful as the men were trying to be — Juan Francisco’s mother was a few feet away, monitoring the process through her tears — they had also been hardened by repetition, and Juan Francisco’s heavy head snapped half-hazard back and forth a few times. His young body was in a half-fetal position inside a black plastic bag. As the crowd stepped back and covered our burning eyes and noses against the putrid odor, Juan Francisco’s family stepped forward, toward the bag, steeling themselves to view their beloved one last time. They knew him only when the late morning sunlight exposed the tattoo on his abdomen.

My grandfather was eighty-five when he was laid to rest in a favorite tan suit of his, which his 98-year young girlfriend had carefully chosen. The blue oxford beneath had always perfectly matched his sky eyes. His hair was neatly arranged, and his face bore a peaceful and natural half-smile. The chapel that housed the ceremony was on the campus of his assisted living facility, and it featured wood paneled ceilings and lovely acoustics to highlight the talented cantor who led our sixty-some friends and family in song. We passed around a microphone and shared our favorite memories of Grandpa Bud. Finally, summer sunlight danced across his flag-draped coffin to the tune of “Taps” as two United States Marines Corps officers saluted him in a final parting.

Juan Francisco is one of seven million Salvadorans, all of whom live in a “middle income country,” or a place that has average financial holdings when compared to the rest of the countries across the globe. These seven million are in turn part of the estimated three-quarters of human beings across the world who live in countries that political scientists call “the Global South.” These are countries whose inhabitants struggle to make ends meet, are more likely to face high levels of violence and crime on their streets, live where wars tend to be fought, have extremely limited opportunities in life and often meet an early death. What this means in Juan Francisco’s case is that his experience was not unique. In fact, the overwhelming majority of the world lives a life and finds an end that is far more similar to Juan Francisco’s than to my grandfather’s.

I am as disturbed by my memories of Juan Francisco as I am deeply grateful for the life that my grandfather was able to live. My gut feeling is this: Juan Francisco’s experience was not right, and my grandfather’s was. I believe that everyone deserves the chance to live and die like my grandfather did. I believe this is true because we are all equal at a fundamental level: we share in a life force which some describe as sacred, some call God, and others seek in nature or science. From this source we seem to derive our sense of self and other as valuable, purposeful beings. The way I see it, the diverse spiritual and religious practices in which we constantly engage across our planet are a genuine open-armed attempt to connect with this omnipresent life source that we have sensed since the beginning of time.

As we were sitting in my father’s SUV in the funeral procession, we began discussing heaven and the Roman Catholic idea of the ultimate resurrection of the spirit. At this stage of my life, the concept of a place where the “good souls” are sent doesn’t add up (and neither does its opposite). It presents a good vs. evil dichotomy and suggests a powerful deity-judge, neither of which make sense to me in a world of such unequal distribution of joy and tragedy. After all, desperation drives us to edges of which we’d never have thought ourselves capable, and privilege can make it easier to be a decent person. The conversation, then, was an invitation for me to answer in silence my internal question: “Where are you, Grandpa Bud?”

I gazed out the window and centered on the lingering feeling I had since my quiet moments alone with his body at the wake the night before: he is still here. Suddenly I realized what that meant to me. I could feel him woven between the grass strands and amidst the sunshine. I sensed the world around me infused with a new burst of peaceful, pious energy. I felt — and feel – buoyed up amidst the chaos of early adulthood, silently accompanied by the steady wisdom that comes of eighty-five years of life. It seems to me that if I open myself to that core space within me, it’s obvious that Grandpa has returned to our source, the energy that is both the recipient of those who we call “dead,” and the daily nutrient of the living.

A spiritual practice, then, is a series of actions that connects me with this spirit — with Grandpa, with Juan Francisco, with all beings -- and in turn with my own essential source. But Juan Francisco’s experience demands more than quiet contemplation from me. The more I connect with this unifying spirit of all life — the thing that makes us equal — the more tragic and unacceptable the lived experience of the majority becomes. The act of witnessing Juan Francisco’s exhumation and accompanying his family that day was, for me, a spiritual act. The act of writing and talking about it since has also been.

Elmore Weldon “Bud” Steffen: February 7, 1926 -- August 18, 2011. Juan Francisco Duran Ayala: 1981 – June 3, 2011. Grandpa Bud, Juan Francisco: may we celebrate you by acting to create a world where all can live fully and die tired, surrounded by love.

Emerging Art in El Salvador, Part III: Colectivo Urbano and Artist Renacho Melgar

2011-08-16T14:43:00.000-07:00

(This is the third and final installment of the series on emerging Salvadoran art written for and published by F Newsmagazine at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mil gracias to the hard-working editorial staff there for giving young Salvadoran artists such important coverage.)

For the final installment of “Emerging Art in El Salvador,” Danielle Mackey interviews Renacho Melgar, a painter and coordinator behind the Salvadoran artist collective: Colectivo Urbano (Urban Collective). Melgar was born in 1981 in San Salvador. He identifies as a painter, because, “simply put, I love to paint and draw every day.” He is 30 years old and is from the generation that grew up on the Wonder Years, Tranzor Z and the Thundercats. He specializes in visual and body art.

Danielle Mackey: Can you tell us a bit about the origins of Colectivo Urbano?

Renacho Melgar: It all began, if you believe it, through hi5. I had recently returned to the country after having lived in Nicaragua and Costa Rica and doing an exposition in Cuba. I wanted to try something different so I contacted my friends, photographer Jorge Merino and painter Efrain Cruz, thinking that we could do a joint exhibit. I didn’t realize we’d end up building a collective together. We ended up going out for coffee and, as artists worldwide always do, we lamented the lack of space and support for local artists, along with the necessity to create something different. Without realizing it, during that long talk over multiple coffees, we had given life to a great idea. We said goodbye planning to go out for another coffee the next week. The very next day, Jorge (Merino) called me and he’d already recorded everything that we had constructed the afternoon before. This is something that never happens: we always get together and talk about our problems and what’s going on, but this time we had a very concrete project that would be simple to fulfill. We decided to do twelve expositions during one year—one per month—with the theme always revolving around urbanity. Urban character, urban landscape, and urban still life are a few examples. That’s where the name Colectivo Urbano comes from.

DM: How did the Collective grow beyond you three?

RM: From our original idea, we wanted to offer open call to all artists in the country in any area (to participate), as long as their work focused on the subject of the month. We found a curator, and we began to search for areas to exhibit outside of San Salvador, because it seems art here is always concentrated in the cities. As you’d imagine, we didn’t have money to offer, so everything relied on our own initiative and negotiations. Soon, the months passed and we had not only done the original twelve expositions, but instead twenty-five of them, and we had involved 40 different artists.

DM: What is unique about how the Collective works?

RM: There have been collectives before us, but our dynamic of collective creation is what sets us apart. I’m proud to say that people are replicating our form of working. We’re not just doing awareness-raising with society, but we’re also making them a part of our creation processes with our urban interventions. We try to involve the public in the moments of creation and development, so that it’s truly our art. All this effort has garnered us legitimacy with different generations in the art world and with the media.

Over the past three years, we have changed our working dynamic in some ways, but we always keep clear that we do everything collectively, and our support and effort goes to emerging places (in the art world); that’s where people call us to be. This is the only way to change the art world in this country, where we tend to go through moments brimming with cannibalism and others characterized by a stupid intellectualism. Our priority is simple: we want to construct a different proposal for art, and I’m being sincere here. This will be a space where we all fit and where all struggles come together; and, above all, this will be a space where we dare to destroy and construct our daily realities through art—including art itself. Even art must be destroyed so that we can rebuild it.

DM: What is your own history with art?

RM: My art was largely rejected by the university, and so I left, and I’m basically self-taught. (Melgar had studied in the University of El Salvador.) Contact with other artists diversified my work, and it has transformed a lot over time, until now, when pieces generally come out something similar to what I have rolling around in my head.

DM: Can you tell us a bit about your slogan, “Any wall is good enough to hang my art upon?”

RM: “Cualquier pared es buena para colgar mi arte.” (My slogan) is my philosophy; if I write a manifesto someday, that will be the first of all chapters. Modern artists place value on art if it’s in a prestigious gallery or a museum, but that is funny to me. I think that what gives value to a work is the personal process it required to make. I’m talking about a cathartic process where three things are involved that can’t be left out: technique, creativity-imagination, and spontaneity. I like to feel that the piece changes even as I’m producing it. Really, it’s all a long process of communication with the piece. And sometimes during creation, I put the piece in front of me and just look at it, contemplate it, and after that I can understand a bit more of how the world might see it. Any space is good enough to share your piece; think of it as your child. The piece is your child and you don’t need to show him off in a castle so that the world will see how beautiful and restless he is.

The real strength of my pieces are that they represent how I live my life—so much so that I don’t like to say much about them. They have enough force on their own. Any wall is good enough to hang my art upon, even if I’m doing an exhibit on the street. Both the street and the museum have their own richness.

DM: Can you tell us about a moment that has influenced you as an artist?

RM: Cancer. (Melgar had a cancerous tumor in the nasopharynx.) I think that in my work there are two phases: before cancer and after cancer. When I was in the ward, I thought about all of the things I hadn’t yet done, leaving them for another day. I thought of myself as a good artist but I didn’t share anything that I did, so as soon as I got out of there my work took a very different path. With the collective, for instance, we didn’t just decide to be a collective. The way we shared made us a collective—eating together, traveling with our works together. Once when we took a 60-piece show to Guatemala we had to sleep in the street. I think that sometimes people don’t understand that having a collective that does things well implies a lot of sacrifice: time, money, ideas, even sometimes romantic partners. (Melgar chuckles.) What happens is that it’s really easy to make a collective; the tough part is doing something different... continuing to propose new things and never stopping.

DM: What do you think of Salvadoran Art?

RM: Salvadoran art is, on one hand, a very academic and almost snobbish affair sometimes. But it’s also quite complex and has a lot of rich variants. Every stage of Salvadoran art has been unique, and we have truly great figures in our country, but, as in all of Latin America, processes happen too slowly and the fact that we don’t share our knowledge with one another gives us complexes. The worst complex that some have is that we’re a small country where no art happens. That’s a big misnomer.

I also see Salvadoran art as a closed space that’s full of fears, because something has made us believe that people can steal your ideas, or that we’re in a constant competition to demonstrate who is the best artist. I think this is partly a result of the daily reality that we live as Salvadoran citizens, and supposedly the art world is full of sensitive people so that’s magnified here. But we won’t have truly bad-ass art until we stop trying to be: trying to be of a certain class, trying to be an “artist,” trying to paint like Europe, trying to be accepted by the critics. We can’t do something that’s not based on our own reality, on our own context. Great artists do nothing more than reflect their own historical time, and the artists in this country suffer from an amnesia that I sometimes think must be self-provoked. As with your average Salvadoran, historical memory doesn’t interest some artists, and that bothers me. We’re constantly living naively in the convulsive day-to-day that we forget to look back, and converse with older artists. We urgently need a generational bridge, a space that allows youth and older folks to talk, or we’ll continue committing the same fuck-ups and we’ll never construct anything; we’ll continue merely replicating what we see in other places.

DM: What do you think of Latin American art?

RM: Latin America is interesting. I don’t understand how in a region with so many different realities, the problems facing those who create are always the same. (We lament) the lack of spaces, lack of support, lack of cash — and this has gotta stop. The Jesus Christ Art Savior will never appear, and if we would just give more effort toward producing we’d be dancing to the beat of a different drum. Art collectives from Mexico, Argentina, Columbia and Peru have all proved this. They’ve realized that we’re creators of a Latino aesthetic that goes farther than the typical responses of pseudo-guerrillas or pseudo-intellectuals. When we stop looking at Europe as the vanguard, we realize that we have plenty to work with here.

DM: Who are some of your favorite artists?

RM: I’d say, off the top of my head, Os Gemeos from Brazil, Arnoldo Ramirez Amaya from Guatemala. But if we’re talking about specifically the Salvadoran big guns, I’d tell you: Benjamin Canas, Cesar Menendez, Antonio Bonilla, Yanira Elias and Mayra Barraza… among others.

DM: What else influences your art?

RM: What interests me more than anything is whatever has to do with the modern human being: the implanted necessities of consumerism, modern implanted diseases like stress or anorexia and bulemia, noise, gangs, the economy. I concentrate on the best and the worst parts of being a modern human being, from our daily battles, to sexuality and gender — all of this is part of who we are. I also try to leave a big space in my work to tackle memory. I like how the brain stores memories and how it constructs histories, collective as well as individual. It worries me that our (national) history is made invisible by the international context we live in, so I look for alternative ways to fusion our present context with our roots to build a bit of historical memory. That which we allow ourselves to forget worries me.

Check out some other artists who have been involved with Colectivo Urbano: Oscar Lopez. Evan Lopez, Miguel Servellon, Sara Boulogne, Rhency Geovani Calo.

(Photos courtesy of Renacho Melgar and Colectivo Urbano.)

Emerging Art in El Salvador, Part II: The Artists

2011-08-05T13:52:00.000-07:00

(This article was originally written for and published by F Newsmagazine, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.)

August 4th, 2011

In part one of this three-part installment exploring the emerging art community in El Salvador, Danielle Mackey visited Artefacto Espacio Cultural, an art space committed to exhibiting the work of emerging Salvadoran artists — from students, to established art makers. In part two, Mackey talks shop with three Salvadoran artists, narrating photos of their work with tidbits from their conversation.

“We have to have these conversations more frequently!” Sara Bolougne, a Salvadoran modern ceramic artist, both a lamentation and celebration of the space that four of us created on a rainy, cool evening on the back porch of a San Salvador café. Bolougne, together with Fredy Granillo and Sandra Leiva, represent three leading figures in the movement of emergent artists of El Salvador. That night they shared with each other and myself some samples of their work, along with thoughts about topics ranging from the power of art in the family, specifics of their own pieces, and the divisions within the Salvadoran art community.

Though all three were educated at the National University of El Salvador’s School of Art and Culture, Bolougne and Leiva had never met before that night. What brought them together was Granillo: he had been a student of Bolougne’s, and has taken classes with Leiva. This surprising lack of contact within a specific community in a small country became a thread woven throughout our discussion that night. “I can’t believe we’ve never met,” Leiva said at once point, confounded. “Clearly we do not have the dialogue spaces we need.” Thus, the real power of the evening happened long after I left: Bolougne and Leiva stayed, holed up in our corner table on the patio, smoking cigarettes and reveling in this new-found space for two talented people to lay important groundwork for the future of Salvadoran art.

To see the slideshow of the artists' work and read highlights from the rest of the interview, click here.

Artefacto Espacio Cultural: Emerging Art in El Salvador, Part 1

2011-07-18T17:00:00.001-07:00

(This article was originally written for and published by F Newsmagazine, at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Find it here.)

Part one of a three-part series exploring emerging artists, art, and art practices in El Salvador.

San Salvador
July 18, 2011

“You’re here to see the young man?” The sturdy gentleman in a tan vest with a semi-automatic slung around his shoulder asks as I walk up to the small museum’s front door. “He’ll issue you in; just a second,” he says. The name of the “young man” is Carlos Funes, and he is the owner and principal director of the museum, called Artefacto. The security detail is there because Funes also happens to be the son of the current president of El Salvador.

The guard sweeps open the tinted glass doors and I find myself flanked by another three guards, seated just inside. The museum is small — shot-gun shaped, perhaps about five meters wide and three times as long — and the main offices are in the back. It’s dimly lit in an attractive way, and a projector throws onto the back white wall a video of an acoustic performance by the popular Mexican band, Zoé. Funes exits the office in his green-brown suit and tie. I feel a bit under-dressed in my jeans and Converse, but Funes has an ear piercing.

Beginning to speak almost before sitting down, he explains that the music video is modeling an idea they have for an upcoming exhibit: to film minimalistic, 2-camera acoustic performances of Salvadoran bands with a small audience enjoying the performance. Then, he points out the walls, hung with paintings and drawings. His initial comments explain why Funes does not refer to “Artefacto” — which means “artifact” when translated literally — as a museum. The full name of the building is the Artefacto Espacio Cultural (Artifact Cultural Space). Funes, together with a team of artists, began this space in May of 2010. Their idea is to provide a place for various forms of art, and activities devoted to the promotion of art, as a vital part of Salvadoran culture.

Although it opened just last year, the concept for Artefacto has been germinating for a while. Carlos previously worked with a local troop of videographers and documentarians, called Tripode. What brought him to Tripode was an appreciation for art in his lineage. (Carlos’ mother was a plastic artist.) He loved it, but identified as an artist only behind a video camera. He began to wonder how he could get as close as possible to the other types of art that he loves. “How could I facilitate art without being the artist? I don’t know how to play the guitar, though I love music; I don’t have talent with a paintbrush though I love to paint; and though I like to write I don’t have a disciplined pen.” Carlos ruminated on the desire for a while. “One of my most impacting moments in art was when I did a documentary about blind painters with Tripode,” he explains. “I thought, ‘If these blind people have the courage to paint and the heightened sensitivity to produce such beautiful art, I can make my contribution too.’”

Funes’ contribution manifests itself in this cultural space, which fills a void that currently exists in the Salvadoran art world. “My idea with Artefacto is — just like the word ‘artifact’ would suggest — to give artists the tools necessary to do their work.” For Carlos, this especially applies to emerging artists. “There is a stigma here that the old guard — those who sell paintings for upwards of $5,000 or 10,000 — are the only ones worthy of sponsorship. But we want to break that stereotype. We have to change our way of viewing these things in this country. All of the Salvadoran masters that we’re still privileged enough to have around were once emerging artists too.” Funes insists that focusing on emerging artists acquaints him with impressive talent. “I see lots of emerging artists that have their own voice, their own style. We have to bet on these young folks.”

Artefacto’s current exhibit proves Funes’ point. It spotlights a series of intricate, vibrant drawings and paintings made by economically disadvantaged youth in a school known as the Experimental School for Plastic Arts and Photography. “You should have seen the kids’ faces when they entered the gallery and saw their own work up on the walls, with placards with their names and spotlights for each piece,” he tells me. “They were ecstatic.”

Though Funes values inexperienced artists, he is not shy about explaining what he sees as the necessity of art as a commercial activity. In fact, Artefacto’s other raison d’etre beyond celebrating art, is selling art. “Some people are too romantic about art: you know, ‘art for art’s sake,’ art as pure passion, etc. In the end, art is a commercial product. It’s a piece that you can sell. There’s a necessity to sell, and artists have to have the vision to be able to do so.”

He emphasizes that his work at Artefacto is an attempt at innovation in Salvador’s small and entrenched art world. There are workshops on Mayan art, a trip to Peru for an exchange between two Salvadoran artists and a museum in Lima, a dance presentation done by a team of two dancers on a floor sprinkled in sand. In May of this year, an exhibit called “Collage” invited both artists and interested lay people in to write on and paint up the walls of the cultural space in homage to Roque Dalton. May is the month that Roque Dalton — perhaps the most famous Salvadoran poet — was murdered in 1975 during the 12 year civil war that ravaged this tiny country, leaving nearly 80,000 dead.

Funes identifies himself as part of a new movement led by emerging artists. This movement extends beyond Artefacto, and includes using digital platforms for art, creating advertising for products that feature emerging artists’ work, and parties in public spaces that involve a night of multiple simultaneous exhibits of photography and visual art, concerts, and beer on tap. And this is only the beginning.

There is surely much to come from Artefacto and the rest of the Salvadoran emerging art movement. Stay tuned for part two of “Emerging Art in El Salvador,” which will feature three young independent Salvadoran artists in a conversation about their motivations, struggles, and opinions of their field.

Body of Young Anti-Mining Activist Exhumed from Common Grave: Investigation into latest assassination begins

2011-06-27T17:43:00.000-07:00

(At left: Cemetery workers unearth Juan Francisco's body.)

JUNE 27 2011

SAN SALVADOR, EL SALVADOR

(Originally written for the Voices on the Border blog. All photos original.)

(Article also published on UpsideDown World.)

The body of murdered fourth-year university student and active member of the environmental movement in the area of Ilobasco, Cabanas, Juan Francisco Duran Ayala, has finally been returned to his family in San Salvador. On June 24, 2011, the family gathered together with members of civil society and representatives from government agencies to exhume his body from a common grave in the Bermeja Cemetery, where he had been buried by the National Civilian Police. Juan Francisco, who lived in Ilobasco, left his home at 9 a.m. on June 3 to attend his classes in San Salvador and never arrived. His body was found on the same day by the police, next to a basketball court in the community of Amatepec in metropolitan San Salvador, with two gunshot wounds to the head.

Juan Francisco’s cousin and a designated family representative, Norberto Hernandez Ayala, claims that because the cadaver had several tattoos, the coroner’s office labeled it as an unidentified person and probable gang member, and buried it in a common grave. Juan Francisco had a tattoo of Che Guevara on his abdomen, and another two of the Barcelona soccer team and a favorite U.S. basketball team on his side and back, respectively.

(Above: Norbert Hernandez Ayala and Fr. Neftali Ruiz of the CAC give a press conference at the Bermeja Cemetary)

His body was identified on June 14 by his father, Jose Benjamin Ayala, in photographs provided by the coroner’s office. Logistical negotiations between the attorney general’s office and the family slowed the process of exhumation ten days. Juan Francisco was laid to rest in a funeral on Saturday June 25, 2011.

Though there exist various theories about the motive for Juan Francisco’s assassination, in a press conference today, Hernandez Ayala confirmed that the primary hypothesis is the young man’s involvement as an environmental activist. The victim’s mother, Marta Duran, added, “What is clear here is that they’re killing innocent people. My son was only a student, dedicated to his studies. I just want justice for my son.”

The afternoon before he disappeared, June 2, Juan Francisco had been seen putting up fliers around the Ilobasco area where he lived, as an active volunteer for the Environmental Committee of Cabanas (CAC.) The messages on the fliers included an open invitation to a public forum on mining, phrases promoting respect for the environment, and a demand for the controversial Canadian mining company, Pacific Rim, to retire its operation from El Salvador. (Pacific Rim is one of two mining companies that have sued the Salvadoran government for a total of almost $200 million, for refusing to grant them permits to conduct metallic mineral mining in several regions of the country.)

Juan is the fourth person active in the anti-mining movement in the department of Cabanas to be murdered in the past two years, and the third victim from the CAC specifically. In a press release published by the CAC, the committee declares, “This assassination comes only two years since the kidnapping and assassination of the anti-mining activist Marcelo Rivera and the assassinations of two of our members, Ramiro Rivera and Dora Alicia Sorto. We believe that if these cases are not cleared up with an investigation that leads to the intellectual authors, impunity will continue reigning in Cabanas, and the intimidation, violence and assassinations will continue.”

A secondary hypothesis of Juan Francisco’s murder is that he was yet one more victim of the constant daily violence that plagues this nation of only 6 million people. According to data from the National Civilian Police, the current daily murder average is 11, and on the date of Juan’s killing, four other unidentified partial-or-complete corpses were found. That number does not include the identified victims of that day. In fact, if the violence continues at this pace, the homicide total for 2011 would be more than 4,000. The local organization Voices on the Border points out that this is an astoundingly high number when compared to New York City, whose population size is higher than El Salvador’s and reports only 412 homicides for the entirety of 2009. The environmental movement discards this theory, stating that Juan Francisco's involvement with the movement was too public and too recent to his sudden murder for these things to be unconnected. They also cite the continuing string of assassinations involving anti-mining activists.

Local environmental activists call on the National Civilian Police and the Attorney General of the Republic to conduct exhaustive investigations of the string of violent crimes in the department of Cabanas. They cite corruption and illicit trades within three local mayoral offices—facts they claim to be well-known to the local population, and which they list in today’s press release—as well as ties between the aforementioned authorities and the mining company Pacific Rim, as possible motives for the violence. As Francisco Pineda, President of the CAC and recent recipient of the internationally recognized Goldman Environmental Prize, asserts, “We can make a good guess about who are the intellectual authors of this crime given our lived experiences here, but that’s not our responsibility. The attorney general and the police have the obligation to investigate and determine the guilty parties.”

On June 24, the attorney general’s office informed Juan Francisco’s family that they had appointed them a lawyer. On the same day, the police also assured them that the investigation had begun. Hernandez Ayala says that the family trusts that what they’ve been told is true, and that justice will take its course. However, a lingering concern is the Salvadoran court system’s lack of precedent in completing exhaustive investigations. A United Nations Development Program report from 2007 found that only 14% of cases enter the judicial system, and only 3.8% are ever fully prosecuted, with the guilty party brought to justice. Speaking specifically of the anti-mining struggle, in all four previous assassination cases, material authors were quickly rounded up and prosecuted, but there exists significant evidence to suggest that they were hired assassins. In none of these cases — of which Juan Francisco is simply the most recent, and the movement fears will not be the last — have intellectual authors been identified by the authorities.

Juan Francisco’s family remembers him as humble, respectful and optimistic. His university professors say that he stood out for his willingness to work together with his peers and his dedication to his studies. He was thirty years old at the time of death, and would have graduated next year with a degree in Linguistics from the Technological University of San Salvador.

Ninth Grade Wisdom

2011-04-12T13:38:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from an insightful essay from a young man named Jose Velasquez in my ninth grade class, after Obama's recent visit. It's an important perspective from the future leadership of this country.

"President Barack Obama visited El Salvador at the end of his Latin America tour to announce a $200 million contribution to the region to fight gangs and drug dealing.... We personally believe that this visit was just another part of the already-lost war against drug dealing. This is a war that the US knows it cannot win, but it would give them a bad image if the "world police" just stand and do nothing. The best the US can do is leave the countries of Latin America to their own luck. Most countries have lived long civil wars and we don't need any other war that drags us against each other. The solution for drug dealing is just giving up the war, legalizing drugs and making this million-dollar industry a tax generator.

Please, USA, understand: there is alot that you have done for El Salvador, but that help has oftentimes come with conditions that help you and hurt us. We want you to mean it when you say, 'We want El Salvador to be successful.'"

Some good answers to immigration questions.

2010-06-07T15:30:00.000-07:00

I want to encourage you to read this latest article from Jesuit priest Dean Brackley. It eloquently and concisely frames the question of immigration-- a subject that can get hairy very quickly. Read this for historical context, for today's situation explained, or for a Roman Catholic analysis of it all.

In 1989, Fr. Dean moved to war-torn El Salvador to fill the void left by of the massacre of the six Jesuits at the University of Central America. Wondering about the articles' legitimacy? Entitled, "Migrants: illegals or God's ambassadors?" and originally published in the National Catholic Reporter, I think this is a solid article based on my US background mixed with several years of life in El Salvador; he writes this article based on his US background plus 21 years of life here.

http://ncronline.org/print/18328

Several good quotes:

"Poverty and lack of opportunity are propelling the migrants northward. They are not looking for the sweet life; they leave reluctantly, out of necessity. John Paul II called this the "migration of the desperate."(20) The notorious wall rising along the southern U.S. border will not stop this migration. Hunger is stronger than fear."

"Throughout the twentieth century, Washington maintained "our friends" in power in Central America. These tiny elites allied with U.S. businesses preside over some of the most unequal societies in the world. That inequality has always produced enormous social tensions. Until recently, the safety valve for this pressure was simply to die before your time, or protest and be killed. Throughout the twentieth century another possible outlet for social pressure, namely social change, was consistently blocked.

Today very few Central Americans foresee a solution to endemic poverty any time soon. But, unlike their forebears, they no longer sit by and watch their children die before their time. Now there is a new safety valve for the social pressure: Los Angeles, Houston, Chicago."

A few reasons why I love this place.

2010-05-28T20:46:00.000-07:00

One: the Salvadoran buses. I swear they run not on gas but on bass, shaking along the roads to the local hip-hop music called reggaeton. Stuffed cartoon characters jive to the rhythm, spinning on strings that hang from the ceiling. The bus windshield proclaims messages to the public like, “Only God knows if I will return”—which, frankly, is a good way to put it, given that conductors drive as if life is a videogame. There is even a specific bus “language” in which Salvadorans are fluent: speak little, no eye contact, make deft and small movements to preserve space, and remember that children and the elderly deserve your seat more than you do. As the largest method of mass transportation in this developing country, buses are the bookends on the Salvadoran day. They say a lot about life here.

Two: because of thunderstorms and car alarms. One of the first things a young foreigner learns in El Salvador is that every clap of thunder sets off thousands of the delicate alarms. The alarms are part of a suspicious society, product of both a recent Civil War and continuing street violence that has this little place vying for the title of the country with the highest homicide rate in the world. They create, however, an instant street symphony.

Three: we're really not that different. From my home state of Iowa, it is a shorter plane ride to El Salvador than it is to California. In fact, perhaps the most common future that young people are finding in this historically poor place is emigration to el Norte. Nearly 700 Salvadorans leave their homeland daily in an attempt to reach and find work in the United States. Salvadoran reality strongly flavors the U.S. melting pot. We´re undeniably intertwined. As the world becomes both more globally connected and more economically divided than ever, what could be more important than bearing witness to the lives that prove why we've got to make it work?

Sexism: It's to Die For.

2010-05-28T15:30:00.000-07:00

Originally written for the Share Foundation E-newsletter, May 2010.

She was 12 years old when she became the reason to finally seek justice.

The girl is from a rural community in the lower Lempa River region of El Salvador. She was born mentally and physically challenged in a country where there are already enough challenges for people who don't face these additional struggles. One day at noon, the neighbors saw a band of men leading her into an abandoned house in the community. When the men left, they found her on the floor, her reproductive organs destroyed along with her childhood.

It turns out that she, along with multiple other girls and women in her community, had long been the sexual playthings of this group of abusers. Two teenagers, 13 and 14 years old, have toddlers fathered by a 60 year old member of the band. Though everyone might have suspected it, no one knew the facts until it went this far; finally, the many violent episodes—some of which the men videotaped—turned into a court case. (The men probably didn't suspect that their movies would one day provide excellent evidence against them.) But until a young girl was almost killed, no one said anything. Why?

The answer is complicated. It could have to do with what happens to people who risk believing in justice in a judicial system whose modus operandi leans toward impunity. For instance, a women's organization in San Salvador called Las Melidas, which picked up the legal defense of the girl, has been receiving death threats from family members of the accused men. Since taking on the case they have also had to take on round-the-clock bodyguards. (It isn't uncommon for key witnesses or other crux people in legal cases to “disappear” before trial.)

It also has to do with attitudes. The community's attitudes about the victim can be further dehumanizing. A woman who works with Cripdes and is accompanying the community as they navigate the case explains that common perceptions about a female victim of sexual abuse include that she is sexually promiscuous; that she tempted the man and therefore received what she wanted; or that she is an “immoral” woman. The victim herself may fear that her “non-marital sexual relations” mean that she has failed her family—or, even more often in this heavily Christian country, God.

These attitudes have a source. Whether spit from the mouths of fearful neighbors or from the pulpit in a twisted religious interpretation, these attitudes are called machismo, and one of El Salvador's big struggles (like most countries in the world) is how to finally shed sex discrimination. This discrimination can be propogated by societal structures, authorities, teachers, parents, etc, and it finds its extreme expression in violence against or the assasination of women, called feminicide. In El Salvador, sexism is so ingrained that the band of men found it completely acceptable to rape multiple women and girls in their own community, in the middle of the day, and not fear retribution. Their male and female family members felt that the Las Melidas team was in the wrong, and that their grandfathers, husbands and sons had done nothing unusual. In short: in this case in the Lower Lempa, Salvadoran "masculinity" was valued over the innocence of childhood. Clearly, it will take a concerted and well-coordinated effort to change this reality.

Luckily, the work has already begun. Ormusa is a peer organization of Las Melidas, and it also works to reconstruct the shards of beauty that oppressive systems leave strewn. This year, they are starting a program aimed specifically at battling feminicide. Silvia J., a young lawyer who is the Officer of Political Advocacy within Ormusa's Violence Attention program, tells us why this program is important. She says that in 2009, 579 Salvadoran women lost their lives to feminicide violence. Between 1999 and 2009, the instance of assasination of women has risen 104%, while that of men 34%. Salvadoran women cannot wait any longer, these statistics show.

Silvia explains what differentiates feminicide from the murder of a female: in instances of feminicide, female victims die in ways that men do not, for reasons that men would not. For example, in El Salvador, 40% of women assasinated are sexually abused before death. Their bodies are often found in the doorway of their homes or in public places, as if the perpetrator wanted the act to be public. The majority of female victims' bodies bear marks of torture, such as messages chiseled into the skin. (Words like “whore” are common.) On the other hand, male victims' bodies are often found hidden far from their homes, and with gunshot wounds to the chest, arms, legs, or head. Their bodies rarely bear signs of torture or sexual abuse.

Silvia also points out that these particular assasinations imply that the victim is an object, and often the property of a man. Women victims are often murdered by an ex-partner after a recent separation or having begun a new relationship. The man's display of jealousy and ownership of the woman reduces her to an object, and ends in her death. This is also a very different result than the one faced by men who decide to make a relationship change, or even to date multiple women simultaneously. In society, men have the tacit permission to make decisions like this, whereas women do not.

Feminicide is a structural phenomenon, Silvia sustains, that is propogated not just by individual perpetrators but also by daily machista attitudes and policies within entities of authority. While protecting citizens from harm is the government's constitutional obligation, it too is culpable. She mentions that she has been at many crime scenes with the coroner where, if the female victim has painted toenails, she is noted as a prostitute. Similarly, if the body displays tattoos, the “possible gang-member” box is checked. Both of these assumptions mark a victim as someone who “searched out their fate,” and thus provide sufficient excuse to avoid the deeper investigation that must go into these cases in order for the State to adequately handle structural phenomena. In the meantime, more pre-teen girls will continue to pay the price for the government's evasion.

In some ways, globalization makes things more difficult, Silvia says. Through CAFTA, foreign companies set their own working conditions without having to follow domestic labor laws, and they often end up violating human rights. In one recent case where a man was found guilty of consistent physical abuse of his wife, his legal argument was that he was so abused by his employer all day at work, he was full of rage upon arriving to the house and had to take it out on someone. (Obviously, the prosecution argued that if he could control himself with his boss, he could also do so with his wife.)

Furthermore, advertisements from companies both foreign and domestic often portray images of women that encourage sexist attitudes. Silvia cites the campaign from a shoe company, MD, which always sports thin, heavily made-up white women in contorted positions and high heels with messages like, “Buy one in every color just because you're depressed.” In 2007, their slogan was “Shoes to die for,” with photos of women's bodies in a morgue, in positions that suggest suicide or assasination, insinuating that the shoes are so desirable that women (as “slaves to fashion”) are willing to kill or die to have them. With constant messages of violence being sent to the public through working conditions and street-side advertisements, the government must make a concerted effort toward combatting feminicide in order to be successful.

Ormusa thus has designed a project to do just that. Silvia says that the Funes administration’s Commission for the Family, Woman, and Childhood has started to make mention of the subject; thus, now is the time to bring the issue to the forefront of the minds of civil society and lawmakers. Ormusa plans to publish articles, increase their political advocacy, and continue educating women about their rights. Silvia encourages us to walk in solidarity with the work of Ormusa and Cripdes in our everyday interactions, whether by using inclusive language or questioning assumptions about gender roles. Only by rooting out our own sexist attitudes can we build a world where childhood isn't sacrificed to errant ideas of adults.

The Share Foundation accompanies both Ormusa and Cripdes in their work. This year, Share is supporting Ormusa's project on feminicide. For more information or to hear about how you can contribute to the struggle for equality, please contact us at tedde@share-elsalvador.org or danielle@share-elsalvador.org.

"She's On Her Way"

2010-05-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

This piece was originally written for the Casa de la Solidaridad Program newsletter.

I write to you in a time of transition. For two years, I have worked in the world of Salvadoran NGOs via the Share Foundation. In August, I will begin a new job in the Salvadoran education system. This is a reflection to you on both life in El Salvador post-Casa, and the experience of working in an NGO.

I am grateful for these past two years at Share. Here, I have observed that the NGO world abounds with good people: “good” in the sense that they are alive in advocating; in investing themselves totally into shaping a point of view that they circle around and around and dive down into, opening themselves to the high tides and droughts of complete self-gift to something. These people have the lucha tattooed on their days, beginning with a groggy, determined sunrise, and continuing with sunset coffee. They breathe in injustice and breathe out possibility. They tire, they dishearten, they disagree amongst themselves, and they retreat to the campo or an urban youth group to recharge. It’s not romantic. It is real. And that is the miracle.

A good NGO functions as a bridge between community initiatives and the resources that are lacking in this world of unfair distribution. I recently spent a day interviewing a woman who works with us through CRIPDES. She told me about an activity planned for this month: an intercambio between women’s committees in the far-removed northern and southern regions of the country. The committee from the southern Bajo Lempa has spent a year growing organic vegetable gardens financed on microloans, and has learned in the process how to budget, to best divide the planting and the weeding, to find the most competitive markets to bring home a little more for their families’ future. That’s a long road for someone who has little education and has for years played a rhythmic, unchanging role of alma de casa. The Bajo Lempa women will visit the northern Chalatenango committee—which is about to begin its own experience with these microloans—and share what they’ve learned. They will discuss the mechanics of gardening, economics, and Salvadoran womanhood. They will see the northern mountains of their tiny country, and find themselves in sisterhood with women they've never had the funds to meet. This initiative is an example of how a gentle third party with access to resources can be a bridge over the effects of poverty. They let the women lead the way across.

My time with Share makes sense of Arundhati Roy: “Another world is not only possible, she’s on her way. On a quiet day, if I listen carefully, I can hear her breathing.” These folks in the NGO community bring to life a patchwork of many passionate and round visions, and offer them to the budding world with outstretched hands. These complex planets of alternative ways orbit each other. In their creativity and political polarities they don’t always jive; but their intersection is the raw material for healthy dialogue.

Living in El Salvador post-Casa brings you to a dynamic relationship with this country. This means learning to hold it all: to hate it some days, because you love it so much. You just know it can be better. Those men on the street don’t have to talk to you like that; this blind kneeling beggar doesn’t have to be homeless; those 14 youth who die daily don’t have to expire so fresh in the world. Living the lucha day after day, sometimes lonely and sometimes radiating inspiration, is no fairy tale. As Padre Dean Brackley says, it’s nothing short of a “technicolor drama.” Living in a violent country with laws that function as suggestions is scary. Salvadorans are human, and they prove to be as beautifully complex as those of us State-side.

This is, however, exactly the stuff you can build a life on. Learning, testing your beliefs, becoming more flexible in some ways and more firm in others. The ideals that you come with are the cobblestones that lay your road to a fuller understanding of our world. It’s just as important to bring them with you as it is to know when it’s time to let them go. This means finding community, yoga, spiritual direction, Pilsners after work. It is taking one step as who you think you are, and the next with a wobbly invitation to change.

I suspect that the experience of moving back to El Salvador after graduation is similar to staying in the U.S. In both circumstances, we leave the insular academic world, our communities, our 17 year-old identity as student. It means more responsibilities and exciting life steps. The stretching that happens no matter where you’re called makes room in you to accept from the world, and to give to it. You don’t have to move back here to do this. Listen to where you feel pulled, and take your wobbly step. Packed into the small “yes” you say is everything you need for the journey.

Danielle graduated in 2008 from St. Louis University and studied in the Casa in Fall 2006.

--- 10 May 2010

2010-05-07T10:53:00.000-07:00

Happy Friday, Kurt Vonnegut

2010-04-23T13:28:00.001-07:00

"When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth."

-- K.V.

--23 April 2010

The Learning Dance

2010-04-12T16:52:00.000-07:00

On Saturday at midnight I stood ankle-deep in tawny sand, observing the waves. The tide of the Pacific is magical at that hour. Its foamy edges strain to reach higher, starving for the beach. In its hunger it breaks down the oldest, most durable bits of earth— pummeling rocks into slivers of sand— simultaneously undoing and recreating the stuff of life. It's funny how watching the ocean in its most eternal, basic function can be mystical.

The ebbs and flows of life in El Salvador mandate these reminders of consistency and beauty from nature. I can learn how to be from this nature. For example: last week I was preparing a magazine piece based on my two years of blog entries from this little country. I found myself surprised by the way that my learning has happened: two steps forward, one step back. Again, and again. My final entry was a perfect example of the trend: I wrote about a discussion of sexism in El Salvador that I had helped lead, in which I advised visiting students to have a healthy suspicion of male strangers; two days later, I had a kind and connective human moment with a young man selling coffee on the street. I am starved for these moments of learning, of breaking down existing knowledge and building it into something wider and deeper.

In my job at the Share Foundation I accompany delegations of people from the United States as they experience the daily reality of El Salvador. The most recent group came from Georgetown University's Magis Immersion and Justice Program. The three professors, nine students and I spent three days in a rural community called Santa Monica. Santa Monica is several hundred families living in sheet metal homes sewn into the landscape by laundry lines and small vegetable gardens, all of it bordered by dusty roads. The scarce work to be found is in sugar cane harvesting, susbsistence farming, or making the 2.5 hour trek to the capital to work as an armed guard.

Santa Monicans radiate with a certain intimacy with life— tough stuff included— which seems to leave them wise. In a brief conversation with one man from the community, he showed me this quality while leading me through the awkward forward-and-back learning dance I can't seem to avoid.

It was the evening of the first full day in the community. The group had eaten a traditional dinner of red silk beans, eggs scrambled with tomatoes and onion, fried plantains, thick corn tortillas and fresh cheese. We were seated in a circle preparing to close the day with a reflection when a host father of two of the young Georgetown men tapped my shoulder. I got up, exhausted and a little irritated by this five-millionth question of the day, in the middle of an intentionally quiet time. We separated ourselves from the meditative group and he asked, “I was just wondering, can we wash our host boys' clothes for them?”

The question took me aback. Washing clothes in the Salvadoran campo means doing it by hand-- rolling the round chunk of electric blue soap around a wet clothing item, scrubbing in brisk motions with a small brush to reach each tiny thread of fabric, and then rinsing and wringing it countless times to chase away the soap. T-shirts take about five minutes, and tougher matierals like jeans or bed sheets up to ten. It's a hefty job.

The more I thought, the more I cringed—and not for the logistics of clothes-washing, but rather for the implied position into which that pushes the host family: service. We visit the community to learn from them; they graciously open their homes and daily lives for us— complete strangers— and ask only for a few days of companionship in return. I'd imagine that it is very hard to open your tin shack to a visitor who comes from a country which you see through the lens of the television— fancy cars, decadent restaurants, Desperate Housewives. The desire to be a good host is cross-cultural. What can you do to make someone from that golden world feel comfortable in your hard-won impoverished life? It must take true humility.

We're aware of this dynamic in our visit to the community, and we want to compensate for the unfair way the world works. We want to serve these people. Certainly not the other way around.

“No,” I say to him, shaking my head vehemently, “Please no, it's not necessary.”
Their host father looks hurt, bruised. He looks away. He speaks softly, avoiding my eyes.
“But it's the only thing we can give.”

Whoa. This delegation guide—this young woman who has been learning for two years now and claims to finally understand a thing or two—knocked ever-so-gently to her naive haunches.

I understand: this man is not really asking about washing clothes. He is asking about washing feet. Śhould anyone be excluded from gifting themselves? Clearly, no.

As I later discussed this moment with the delegation, we realized that there were many forces at play. For instance, most times in life, we members of the U.S. middle-to-upper class are in the position of giver. Donating money to Haiti and soup cans to the food drive, or serving meals at the homeless shelter. Thoughtful things to do. But maybe we forget to think about the ownership inherent in this situation: we are the owners of the resources. We choose to dish them out. When, where, and how. That is powerful. Charity implies a hierarchy, and the giver is at the top. Sometimes, we might forget about this central part of our economic interactions, because we concentrate on how we're alleviating need. It feels good to give.

How does it feel to not be at the top? Many of us in the United States have the luxury of ignorance about that. Many of us can only imagine. Read this paragraph, and then close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths. Think: have you ever had to ask for a few dollars from a well-dressed stranger to afford your next meal? How would it feel to need? Could you maintain eye contact while you asked?

This might bring up indignation, desperation, shame. These clamouring feelings, summoned only when we begin to feel rock-bottom vulnerability, could lead us to further questions: Who “owns” the right to food? To solid housing? To life?

In that swift moment, I watched the whole game turned on its head, when someone born into the societally-mandated “low” position of receiver asked to be giver.

And so my learning rhythm continues: one step back, two steps forward, led by the generous people of El Salvador. My contract with Share is up in August, and I'm staying here. My time with VMM and Share has supported me through finding my balance in this tiny country, and I now wish to accompany others as they do the same: I am applying to teach in the bilingual schools around San Salvador. One step at a time. This mystical, eternal project of learning continues.

-- April 2010
Also published in the Volunteer Missionary Movement's newsletter, "Bridges."

The University of Life: Sexism and Assumptions over Coffee

2010-02-24T13:27:00.001-08:00

(Moments, 4)

I'm sitting at a red plastic picnic table outside a gas station, after having arrived early for my medical appointment at the office around the corner. I have an Eduardo Galeano book before me, but it's closed. My cell phone is out, but it's off. I'm staring into the distance, mulling over things.

A thin man with a bulky square backpack approaches me. His smile is light. "Buenos días," he says. "You look bored." I stay silent, so he explains, "I sell coffee, you see, and here I have styrofoam cups and hot fresh coffee in my backpack, and I was wondering if you want some."

Two evenings ago, I facilitated a discussion on machismo, or sexism El Salvador-style, for visiting U.S. college kids. Here, as in most places in the world, sexism sprouts like weeds through the cracks of many aspects of daily life: in the workplace and the home, at school, on the sidewalk. When an unknown man approaches a woman, his first question is often, "Do you have a husband?" Then, having pried you open that far, he'll likely spring head-first into a pool of questions about whatever details of your private life he'd like to know. A man on the bus last week called me ungracious for refusing to give him my name and address-- which he wanted, of course, after ensuring that I didn't already have a Salvadoran husband.

"You've got to know that you can't trust unknown men here," I told those students. "Don't worry about being nice. You've got to be safe."

Today, this young guy is pouring me a cup of that precious steaming stuff. He says, "You just looked so young and so bored. I felt like I could trust you and thought you might need some coffee."

I smile. Thank you. He walks on with his day.

What I had been mulling over before he showed was where on earth I could find some coffee.

-- 24 Feb 2010

Dignity, Despite it all. (Moments III)

2010-01-28T18:03:00.000-08:00

A friend tells of a recent experience leading a workshop for children in inner-city San Salvador. The children were asked to draw pictures of what they like about their community, and what they don't like. My friend asked a nine year old girl what she planned to draw for “dislike.” She replied in a soft voice: “I don't like that they kill people.”

There are implications for this in a child's life. One: living in entrenched violence, you cannot leave the house after sunset. How many times has she seen the stars?
.........................

On January 16th, El Salvador celebrated the 18th anniversary of the signing of the Peace Accords, which ended their civil war. In this nine year-old girl's community, the kids thought about their streets. Their next step seemed obvious to them. They decided: we will write and sign our own Peace Accords.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Last weekend, I went with the Friends of Santa María to a community called Joya Grande that was affected by the flooding of November. We bounced in Beth's blue Ford Ranger down miles of dusty pock-marked roads, sharing the truck bed with black plastic bags of donations from far-away people: shampoo, soap, food, clothes, toothbrushes. We parked next to the Joya Grande communal house, a large room with a concrete floor and a sheet-metal roof. The donations are for the six families who are squatting there, their houses destroyed in the landslides. They survive together the days of no control over where meals come from; of no access to medical attention for a broken ankle; of constant questioning over which neighbor to ask this time to share her well water so they can bathe.

The families encircle the truck and help us take inventory to ensure that everything is equally distributed. One man is pacing. He's bounding from group to group, then trying to catch my eye. Searching to be helpful.

When the donations have been unloaded from the bed, only bits of trash remain: chip bags, water bottles, cigarette butts. He springs into the truck, reaches for a plastic bag. “You can't go back to the city with garbage in your car,” he insists. “I'll clean it for you.”
...........................

We interview the people of Joya Grande about their situation. I've been talking to a community leader for an hour about logistics. He's tall, in his mid-30's, and sports a recently-ironed oxford shirt. He gives me names of people who legally own the land in Joya Grande; people who live in large houses, far from here. He gives me numbers of community members homeless, the numbers left cropless. He lists names of government representatives who have visited with news of new houses they will build; construction has begun.

I thank him for filling me in-- for briefly welcoming this white kid with a square notebook and a sunburnt face into his world. He cuts me off: “No. Thank you, thank you for coming... It’s just that every day is so hard… We don't expect you to come all the way out here with gifts from people we've never met...”

Then he can't continue. His eyes fill, and his hand instinctively flies up to touch his throat, to distract. Campo men never cry. It's a violation against maleness. He turns away and walks down the dusty road toward home.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On January 28, the US Embassy sends out another of its warning messages to US citizens living in El Salvador. Just so you know, it says, you may be a victim of a grenade attack. Twelve killed and sixty injured in the past three months for refusing to pay extortion money, the email says, which someone wrote on a computer barricaded behind the Embassy's high white walls. Be aware in open-air markets, malls, police stations, and pediatric clinics, it says.

Meanwhile, also on computers inside the Embassy barricade, they're rolling full steam ahead with an assembly line of trade policies and aid packages and multinational corporation connections.

Meanwhile, these US-made products continue to come with extra features: five dead because they oppose multinational corporate mining; a two-hundred million dollar lawsuit against the cash-strapped Salvadoran government in a court in Washington, DC; ever-deepening poverty; increasing violence in desperation.

Meanwhile, I feel lucky to have not been a nine year old girl when I found out that sometimes the world works like this.

-- 28 January 2010

Bread For Sale (Moments II)

2010-01-18T20:52:00.001-08:00

On the daily way to work, I pass an old man selling sweet bread out of a Styrofoam cooler. His bread is stale. He humbly admits it: the thin wafers are packed into plastic bags, too many for the 50 cent price tag. It’s reasonable to assume that most of his sugary sales he wins with his sweet face. He's wrapped in about 80 years' worth of cascading wrinkles. His unblinking eyes call to mind Shrek’s Puss-in-Boots. Unruly round ears scurry out from beneath his white ball-cap purely to deceive the customer: you've got to talk ten decibels louder than normal when giving him your order. As we younger folk (as is almost everyone who has the energy to absorb the stimuli of these streets) sweep near in our morning rush, he steps into the sidewalk and gestures meekly to the bread cooler. Utters a crackled peep: he has bread for sale!

- 18 Jan 2010

A Tale of Two Bars (Moments I)

2010-01-18T19:58:00.000-08:00

We’re about fifty feet from the Pacific Ocean. It’s a night out with friends: a female drum line that performs around the country. That night they played a show on the sand, surrounded by Central Americans shaking their dreadlocks to the timeless thunderous beat, European vacationers tapping their feet along, careful not to upset the beer in hand. The night was dark and the stars bright and the waves insatiable, natural greed, lapping the sand.

Later, I’m standing leaned against a thick wooden pillar in a beach bar, talking to a blond friend. Her eyes suddenly lock beyond my shoulder. In a half-second, she freezes her expression in emotionless and pulls me backward. The overhead reggae disappears; male voices, distorted, loud. Then the dull smack of fist against sinew. Again, and again, and again; five seconds before I regain my footing, now pulled five feet back by my friend’s side, and the two of them are horizontal over the spot where I was standing; one on top and beating, beating. Something to do with a woman, his drunken words are spilling about, and two teams are forming behind them like the backdrop chorus that helps guide Greek plays. The fight infects the chorus and it’s like one pulsating being with fifty flailing arms and twenty-five bloody noses. Someone’s gotta have a gun in that group, I think.

The hundred-some majority of us are cowering bystanders, taking cover behind the pillars, slinking away. Someone pulls the aggressor off the plastered guy— he’s now lost consciousness— and the bar bouncers suck the life out of the mob, kick out the aggressor and his team. They leave walking backward, spewing threats on beat with each step, pace the entrance at the end of the driveway like pissed-off Rottweilers. There’s a mass exodus from the bar. We lump into our minivan and the plastered guys’ friends beg us through open windows: he needs to go to a hospital. You’ve got a car, you’re going back to the city. Take us, please. But they’re drunk, their shirts are torn and bloody, and god knows what associations they would bring with them into our van, into our lives. We are five young women armed with drumsticks. Timeless thunderous thoughts: safety first. Never mind this guy, who's draped in his friends' arms like an overgrown sleeping child, or a large afghan rug dripping blood.

Days march into weeks and then I’m in Des Moines, forty-eight hours before Christmas 2009. This time, the beat pulsates from speakers in a bar with high school friends. I’m deep catching up with a friend I’ve been waiting many months to see and we’re practically screaming over everybody else who must be doing the same thing. Suddenly I hear a male voice above the rest; it comes from my right, from the balding guy in a gray-green tee sitting with a group of four men I noted earlier. I stiffen and I can’t hear my friend anymore. I turn away from her and search for the epicenter. But the guy stays leaned back in his booth, arms locked comfortably behind his head, bantering across the table. Just another fun night out. I turn back to my friend, flushed: “Sorry for getting distracted, Amanda. I didn’t mean to be rude…”

- December 2009

Laughter.

2009-12-20T20:21:00.000-08:00

“I don’t like serious people,” she says to me. We’re standing along a night-time two-lane highway next to the smoking Ford Ranger, hood propped open. We’ re three hours into our road trip. We just called the police to see about getting a ride to the nearest big city, San Miguel, but they tell us they have no gas. This is no place to be stuck, but here we are. “Hay que reirse o no vale la pena,” she says. You’ve gotta be able to laugh or it’s not worth it.

Her name is Gloria, but she goes by Negra, and she is 25. She studies physical therapy at the National University. Six of us are accompanying Negra this weekend in an annual pilgrimage with her community back to a parcel of land in Honduras. The UN High Commission on Refugees built a camp there to receive them as they fled the Civil War, and for nine years her family lived in exile. Negra was born in the refugee camp. Her history has led her to this night with us, when she's standing on an abandoned stretch of dangerous highway next to a totaled truck, and laughing.

We finally arrive to her home community of Segundo Montes in the department of Morazan late that night, and our sunrise awakening comes too soon. A quick cup of coffee and then we're driving the winding rock road to Honduras in the back of a rollicking cargo truck bulging with the people of Segundo Montes, kicking up Negra's memories along with plumes of dust. “We lived well here,” she says. “We always had beans, corn, tortillas, bananas from the trees.”

Life inside a refugee camp is highly regulated. Refugees cannot leave the territory; enforcement soldiers roam and shoot on sight of an attempted escape. The only supplies available are those that are shipped in by the United Nations. Thus, Negra didn’t taste soda until she was six years old and returned to El Salvador. She didn’t know what potato chips were. Negra remembered, “Hondurans would cross into the camp with fruit that didn’t grow inside our area,” she said, “and we were like the damn natives forking over gold to the Spaniards: we handed over pounds of beans and corn to the Hondurans for a few pieces of fruit.” I gaze out. These are the same hills that greeted the sea-legged Spaniards hundreds of years ago.

Negra brings me back. She's talking about how a kid lives cordoned off by rifles instead of picket fences. “One day, a bunch of us decided to play soccer in a flat patch, but it was a little outside the camp territory. Suddenly the soldiers appeared with their guns, poised to shoot, and we ran like crazy people. We got back inside and fell down laughing. Whoo! We made it!” We drive past a thick bunch of trees on the crest of a hill: “Oh, there! Daniela, the kids used to do theater shows, reenactments of natives running out of those trees with painted faces and sticks for spears.” A little further on: “See there? That was the health clinic. And there? That was the school.” All I can see are flat patches of land stuck suddenly among the hills, overgrown. We're driving through Negra's past.

When she was five, Negra experienced her first car ride. She had seen the four-wheel drive UN beasts but didn’t know what they were. Once, an official invited her to ride with him as he distributed grains around the camp. As the jeep shifted into gear, she exclaimed to the man, “The trees are moving!” She and friends spent all afternoon riding around, savoring the wonder of this new thing, but had forgotten to tell their families where they were. “When we got home, boy, were we in trouble,” she says. “They had given us up for dead.”

We arrive at a cemetery and hop off the truck. This is Negra’s principal reason for returning here every year: to clean her mother’s grave. Her mom was seventeen when she died in an accident in the camp, when Negra was one. We begin to pull weeds from the simple mound topped by a circle of stones and a wooden cross. Negra’s constant joking banter quiets, and instead, she's grabbing at each fleck of weed as if it were a premature gray streak in her ebony hair. She places and replaces the rose arrangements she has brought to adorn the grave, her aunt and younger cousin chiming in from behind: “No, tie it against the cross, it’ll be more balanced that way.” Negra steps back. Raises her finger to her lips, hushed, concentrating. Steps forward to pluck out the shiny plastic heart that the florist placed in the center of the bunch, blows the dust off the top, puts it back in. Steps back, finger to her lips. It’s ok. She sits in place, crosses her legs, gazes at her mother’s mound. She doesn’t look sad, but she does look connected to this place, serious. Pulled into the moment.

Then, the spell breaks. She’s back to her banter. We crack open the fresh tortillas and cheese for lunch, wash it down with Pepsi.

Some members of Segundo Montes decide it's time to take a walk. We wander the mountainous green hills that surround the camp. A few women who were guerrilla fighters during the war are accompanying us. They laugh when they spy a familiar tree that was a landmark, a meeting space. One of the women hasn't been back to this land since the end of the war. She left her family and picked up her rifle when she was fifteen, living bunkered in these hills for ten years. Today upon returning, she is sobered, even while flanked by playful Negra and friends. The women navigate the unmarked paths through the endless corn and brush. They look like they also sprouted from this land.

"Where are we going?" I ask, wading through green. Negra laughs, "We're just walking." She pauses, nods her head. "Yeah. We lived well."

- 20 December 2009

(Photos courtesy of photographer Pat Flajole. See more of Pat's work at http://picasaweb.google.com/PFlajole. Thanks also to Pat and Dan Nemes for editing help to get this little adventure down on paper.)

Happy International Mining & Impunity Day.

2009-12-10T09:03:00.000-08:00

(I repost this article written by Grahame Russell. See my former ActionAlert post for more information on the Marcelo Rivera case. As we come together with family this holiday season, may we be reminded of the power of our unified voices to ask that the cost of business not be human lives.)

December 10, 2009

INTERNATIONAL MINING & IMPUNITY DAY:
CANADIAN MINING COMPANIES MAKING A KILLING IN EL SALVADOR, GUATEMALA, CHIAPAS, …
By Grahame Russell

Across the world, December 10th is celebrated as “international human rights day”. For the global mining industry, we commemorate “international impunity day”.

Below, summaries of three recent assassinations related to community-based struggles in resistance to Canadian mining companies.

Just three stories, of many stories of repression that occur, worldwide, against community and indigenous leaders working in defense of community-controlled development and in protection of their community health and environment; local men and women who are educating and organizing their communities to resist the harms and violations caused by global resource extraction companies.

PACIFIC RIM & THE KILLING OF MARCELO RIVERA MORENO (EL SALVADOR)

In early July 2009, the body of Marcelo Rivera, a teacher and community leader, was found dumped in a well. He was “disappeared” on June 18. Torture signs were found on his body, including burn marks and missing toe and finger nails. Before and after Marcelo’s disappearance, torture and murder, he and other community leaders have been receiving death threats. For years, the Rivera brothers and many Salvadorans have been working hard, at risk of obvious repression, to prevent Pacific Rim, a Canadian gold mining company, from operating an open-pit, cyanide-laced gold mine in the Cabanas state, near the Honduran border.

No justice has been done for the death of Marcelo Rivera. Pacific Rim denies any responsibility, or that this death squad assassination is linked to their now aborted mining plans. The previous ARENA Party government of El Salvador blamed the murder on gang violence.

Meanwhile, Pacific Rim is trying to use a World Bank “mediation” procedure (the World Bank is a major investor in global mining companies) to sue the government of El Salvador for millions of dollars in “lost profits”. (No, the family members of Marcelo Rivera cannot use this World Bank procedure to seek justice or remedy – it is only for corporations and investors.)

HUDBAY MINERALS & THE KILLING OF ADOLFO ICH (GUATEMALA)

On September 27, 2009, Adolfo Ich, a Mayan Qeqchi teacher and community leader in El Estor (eastern department of Izabal), was shot and captured by security guards in the hire of HudBay Minerals. Hours later, family members found him abandoned in the company building where the HudBay guards had detained him. He died soon after of his gunshot wounds and beating.

Adolfo Ich, and local Mayan-Qeqchi villagers, have long been resisting the harms and forced evictions caused by Canadian nickel mining companies. The first wave of evictions, killings and repression occurred in the 1970s, early 1980s. Evictions and repression began again in 2006 (by Skye Resources), through to today. No justice has been done for any of the earlier killings and abuses, nor in Adolfo’s case. HudBay Minerals denies any responsibility and continues with efforts to “relocate” potentially thousands of Mayan-Qeqchi villagers, living on these lands since long before the first nickel miners (INCO) arrived in the 1960s.

BLACKFIRE EXPLORATION & THE KILLING OF MARIANO ABARCA ROBLEDO (MEXICO)

Mariano Abarca Robeldo, a community leader from the state of Chiapas, was known in Mexico for his work in promotion of community development and the environmental, in opposition to health and environmental harms and human rights violations caused by mining.

On November 27, 2009, he was assassinated in the town of Chicomuselo, state of Chiapas, near the border with Guatemala. The alleged assassins are employees of and/or linked to Blackfire Exploration Inc, a Canadian mining company, … that denies any responsibility for the crimes.

IMPUNITY – LOCAL TO GLOBAL

These are not exceptional cases. They are stark snap-shots of repression, let alone environmental and health harms that are common in communities (usually poor, often indigenous) where many mines operate.

Neither is the impunity exceptional. Companies operate with effective impunity from prosecution or accountability in many countries where they operate mines. They operate with impunity in the sphere of international law. And, above all, they operate with impunity in Canada where they are headquartered, where all the major corporate and investor decisions are taken. There are basically no criminal or civil laws to hold Canadian companies accountable for environmental and health harms or human rights violations (including killings) that occur related to their business operations elsewhere.

There are efforts in Canada to pass legislation - Bill C-300 – that would provide an administrative framework for government oversight and possible economic sanction (withdrawal of public funds a particular company might be receiving) in the case of mining company wrong-doing. If passed, Bill C-300 would not provide for criminal law punishment, in cases where crimes were committed; it would not provide for financial or other remedies to the victims of mining company harms and wrongs, if proven.

Even at that, Bill C-300 is being strongly opposed by the mining industry and supporters in the Conservative and Liberal parties.

Their opposition to enforceable laws, remedies and punishment is hypocritical and cynical. I wager that all the mining company executives and politicians opposed to the enactment of binding and enforceable legislation swear by the values and accountability mechanisms of democracy and the rule of law – just not when they would and should apply to their corporate activities abroad.

I wager that were these company executives and politicians themselves (and their families and home communities) victims of environmental and health harms, or human rights violations, they would expect and demand nothing less that full political and legal accountability for the harmful actions, and full remedy for the harms and losses.

Happy international impunity day to the global mining industry.

(Grahame is co-director of Rights Action, info@rightsaction.org, www.rightsaction.org, that funds and supports community development, environmental defense, disaster response and human rights projects in Guatemala and Honduras, as well as Chiapas, El Salvador and Peru.)

For the Time Being.

2009-11-28T13:49:00.000-08:00

I carry these Annie Dillard quotes on a folded and well-worn sheet of paper in my journal. They guide me to a place of clearer perspective. Ive been thinking about how, lately, I have spent time merely putting down problems and not offering many answers about life here. Flooding, drugs, murder, unhealed war wounds, trapped furry creatures-- you know, feel-good stuff. You all deserve some sort of medal for continuing to read this little blog.

But for me at this moment, crashing headlong through the calamity and trying to jettison it--to mix it up into some sort of answer-- isnt honest. (Trying to weave everything into an answer, a work plan, a budget, is actually a very US-American gut reaction, Ive learned. Thats not to say that there isnt a place and a time for proactivity. Its just nice to start to see your roots from the outside-in.)

There may come a day when I do shift my focus. For now, I appreciate reminders like these from Dillard about where this all fits in a universe that is thousands of years old. You know the tired adage, "Its the journey, not the destination"... What does that really mean? To me, it says: You can live on this stuff. You are. The universe always has. And its not pretty, but it is achingly beautiful.

Without further ado, I introduce you to Annie, "For the Time Being." I hope these lines care for you in your days like they do for me, in mine.

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"A hundred years ago, Americans saw frenzy consuming their times, and felt the whole show could not go on much longer. Those people had seen electricity come and buffalo go.... Surely theirs were apocalyptic days. Rushed time and distance were converging on a vanishing point before their eyes. They could, by their own account, scarcely bear their own self-consciousness. Now they seem innocent; they sang "A Bicycle Built for Two" and endured their times' moral and natural evils. Since these evils no longer threaten us close to home--neither slavery, civil war, nor bacterial infections-- they do not, of course, seem as vividly terrible as our own evils." 32

"On December 1, 1931, Anna MacRae came to life. How many centuries would you have to live before this, and thousands of incidents like it every day, ceased to astound you?" 36

"(Teilhard) spent twenty-three years of his adult life far from home in China, almost always in rough conditions. Why knock yourself out describing a dream? 'If I should lose all faith in God,' he wrote, "I think that I should continue to believe invincibly in the world." 44

"Ecstasy, I think, is a soul's response the waves holiness makes as it nears." 138

"We are sent into the world of contradiction; when we soar away from it into spheres where it appears fathomable to us, then we evade our task." 141

--28 November 2009

Cocaine/ Cats/ Imaginary Conversations

2009-11-23T21:40:00.000-08:00

On Sunday morning 13 September 2009, a man drove to the street corner up from my house, parked his white sedan with silver rims, got out, closed the door, and walked away. In the trunk, he left behind three bodies. Another body he left in the back seat. No one knows who he is or why he did it, though connections to the drug trade and gangs are suspected.

What people do know is who the victims were. María del Carmen Lino, found in the trunk, was 12 years old. Her two friends, Katherine and Evelin, were 13 and 17. Along with a colorful beach bag toting towels, they were found wearing swimming suits and with electrical wire wrapped around their necks. Their fourth companion Carlos, found in the back seat, was 24. They say that the girls were from an inner-city community that is often used as a pit-stop for drugs on their way to consumers in the United States.

When figuring up the price of cocaine, remember to factor in these kids’ lives.
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On Monday evening 14 September 2009, my roommate Juan and I came across a group of four people standing around a drainage grate outside the supermarket. Normally, a circle of people here means a crime scene; a dazed robbery victim, a body. These folks were staring at the ground. Juan and I joined them and looked down to see two yellow eyes wobbling underneath the street in the drain: a cat, trapped in the dank darkness, begging the lot of us to save him. Several men had already tried to lift the metal grate with no luck. It was nearly cemented in with settled street debris. One guy approached and slowly shook his head, saying, “He’s been trapped down there for two days.” There are murmurs from the circle of onlookers: “aye dios (oh my god),” “pobrecito” (poor thing). A living creature trapped in a drainage pipe during rainy season is one of those unbearable things. It has to do with locking eyes with something doomed that wants to live, and being powerless to save it. In a moment of cynicism fed by the past days’ events, I mutter, “Geeze. This is El Salvador in a nutshell.”

A short man on my left whips out his cell phone to call the firefighters, but they just hang up. (“This isn’t the United States,” a round man in a red FMLN ball-cap explains to me, “there are no protections for animals here.” And far bigger problems to worry about, I think.) Someone produces a wooden cane to try to pry open the metal grate, but it threatens to snap under the metal weight. We’re thirty-five minutes in now and not making much progress. People are beginning to lose hope, and everyone has somewhere they were supposed to be. Last ditch efforts begin. Juan calls a friend to come with his tools. A middle-aged man in a black oxford and khakis kneels and begins to dig out the crystallized debris with his hunting knife. The circle of unlikely lifeguards all shuffles about nervously, trying to mentally prepare to have watch a cat drown.

Then, magically, the grate jiggles. Someone lifts it. With not a second’s hesitation, the man with the hunting knife slides into the infested narrow drain. He hunkers low and talks softly to the cat, who is by now cowered far into the pipe. He coo’s it forward a few steps, makes a deft swipe at its scruff, and—like the climax scene out of any number of Lassie-esque blockbusters-- lifts the cat to safety.

When a Salvadoran man eats a stack of pupusas, the goopy national food stuffed with refried beans, he leaves the plate inexplicably, crystalline clean. When a Salvadoran woman passes you on the 5pm walk home from work, her makeup is in place and she leaves behind a waft of perfume. Perhaps to compensate for the overpopulated, underfunded, generally dirty streets they walk, San Salvadorans are hyper-clean. Add this to the unfathomable violence that is part of the daily reality here, and one would assume that a Salvadoran confronted with a stuck mangy feline would write it off as just the way life goes. But this middle-aged man in dress clothes just jumped into a drainage pipe for a street cat. The group claps him on the back.

For my part, I feel that I might uncontrollably kiss his dusty cheek. I want to burst out something ridiculous, something like, “Thank you for being kind!” I want to thank every person in that circle who overcame the cynicism that can come of living in this reality. We’ve all seen so much evidence of the opposite—too much—and kindness seems like too much to ask even of yourself sometimes. I feel like that man pulled me out of the concrete hole. Which sounds ridiculous, but it’s true in a way. The hope in the circle that day resuscitated the part of me that went numb when I heard about three mutilated young girls’ bodies tossed on my street. This has got to be one way to keep yourself truly alive in a place this violent.

By this time, the thin and shaky little rescue is nestled into my arms. He needs a home. A young man wearing a SuperSelectos Grocery polo, who has been watching the whole scene a few feet away, notices this too. He's just gotten off his shift. His face bright, he asks if he can take the cat home. He's never had one, he says; and based on his expression, he's lived life until now with a small cat-shaped hole in his heart. Street cat-turned-pet and his proud new dad turn and walk toward the bus stop.
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The high of the Great Cat Rescue lifted me all through the next day. The following evening on my way home from work, I was walking down the street where they found the white sedan. I had to leave late from the office because a rainstorm hit at 5 and I had no umbrella. As I’m walking, I see a white sedan parked ahead to my right. My memory of the front page of the newspaper gives me an eerie feeling. Of course it can’t be the car; but at 7pm on a drizzly night, it’s certainly not comforting. My jaw muscles tense as I approach.

Suddenly in my left-hand peripheral vision I notice a pair of baggy jeans. A man in the shadows. I jump about two feet in the opposite direction. “Buenas noches,” the man offers, who turns out to be young and has a gentle voice. “Buenas noches,” I sputter in return. And secretly in my mind, I gasp to him, “You scare the shit out of me.” His presence reminds me that I’m a young woman walking alone in a world where violence wins. As I continue on, nearing the coffin-car look-alike, my better half kicks in. “Discrimination,” it insists, “How would you like it if passing folk took one look and decided you were up to no good?” And how does that contribute to a society where we trust each other? I apologize to the kid in my mind.

But until I’m safely beyond the crime scene, my fears play a tough offense. I settle the matter by considering that, ironically, this may be one way to stay sane amidst violence. In some dark corners of this city, the only place to talk to each other as fellow human beings is outside the grocery store, or in our imaginations.

-- September 2009
(Photo courtesy of Veronica Reyna.)

After the Storm: A Photographic Journey of Comunidad Las Cruces

2009-11-23T14:29:00.000-08:00

Comunidad Las Cruces is located about thirty minutes from San Salvador. It consists of an estimated 30 families and is an incredibly green, rural marginalised community. In the storms two weeks ago, Las Cruces suffered long-term crop loss, damage to multiple family homes, and the loss of one family, who were killed when their house collapsed atop them.

Las Cruces sits atop land that is almost entirely second-growth forest. This means that older trees and vegetation with strong roots-- which normally stabilise top-soil-- have been cleared for logging or new housing here, in Central America's most densely populated country. El Salvador is the second most deforested place in the Western Hemisphere after Haiti.

Please read more about relief efforts and the group who accompanied me on this visit on their blog, http://friendsofsantamaria.blogspot.com/

Sam and Brian make relief bags to hand out in Las Cruces. Each bag includes items like matches, candles, rice, beans, pasta, toothbrushes, soap, a potable hydration solution akin to Gatorade, and cookies for the kids. Nine of us visited the community on Saturday to bring these basic necessities, and to bear witness to the devastation wrought by four hours of rain and years of incompetent management of the country's wealth.

Emilio, FMLN representative from the local party, addresses families who have come to receive relief packages. We bought the supplies at the grocery store that morning in San Salvador with money donated by many generous folks in the US. Since there are no NGO's that work in this particular community and the ARENA mayor has been accused of corruption, we had to rely on representatives of the other main party, the FMLN, to provide us with their knowledge of the area and connections who could point us to the families in most need. This dynamic demonstrates well the extremely polarized nature of Salvadoran daily life.

One family who received a package, standing in the doorway of their home. The littlest in the family, Abigail, leans on the door and shows us with her fingers that she is 5 years old.

The mayor's office has sent the Ministry of Public Works (MOP) to clear the dirt road that runs through Las Cruces. The road had been flooded with mud. The mayor in this region is from the ARENA party, and is being accused of hoarding relief resources in his office and distributing only to political friends. Disasters are often seen by Salvadoran political parties as a strategic time to win votes for the next election-- a practice that ranges from relief goods distributed in bags with party logos to corruption and aid-hoarding. It was thus a pleasant surprise to see a state organ functioning for the good of the people amidst the crisis.

Observing one of the multiple minor mudslides that happened in the community. The ground juts like giant natural stair-steps down the side of the basin in which Las Cruces lies, with various houses built on each "stair." Here, Maggie and two men from the community inspect the debris and rock that fell from above and took off the corner of the roof of the house below, owned by a man named Luis Alfonso. Had it rained much more that night, Luis' house would have washed away, along with those above his, which have now lost much of their foundation as the loose earth tumbled downhill. In the second photo, Brian and Sam listen to Roberto Alexander as he points out his house above, which now has one corner jutting precariously off the “stair step.” His three children peeked at us from above.

Walking up a pyramid of stairs that leads into the higher sections of this community, built almost vertically on lands of constant high risk for disaster. Most marginalized communities in El Salvador are forced to build substandard housing--the only affordable shelter-- on lands that no one with financial resources would want. The best (read: safest) land in the country is sold off to be used to build gated communities and luxury shopping malls that, as Jesuit Dean Brackley says, "look like they dropped out of outer space," given the pervasive poverty in which 65% of residents live. This man totes two bags of relief packages weighing about 10 lbs a piece, and a 10lb jug of drinking water.

This is the one wall left standing of a house that was completely demolished in a landslide. Its cracked pattern resembles delicate china that has been damaged; and indeed, the house shattered something akin to that under the weight of the rushing earth. The family of four who lived here were buried in their sleep and found at 7:00 the following morning. Their names: the father, Carlos Alberto; the 26 year-old mother, Mirna Guadalupe; daughter Azucena, who just celebrated her 9^th birthday; and daughter Guadalupe Lizbeth, 10 months old.

Mirna's wooden bed-turned-coffin. She was unearthed with her arms around little Guadalupe.

The community knows that they live in constant danger. They try to minimize that by building retaining walls to catch mudslides. Here, we see the wall that protected Mirna and Carlos' house. It was made of cinderblocks laid over a skeleton of iron pipes, and the latter provides the majority of the strength in a wall. Unfortunately, iron is very expensive, and though the community put in as much as they could afford, the landslide of water and mud easily wrenched the wall's beams into an awkward zig-zag and rushed on, finally slamming into Mirna and Carlos' house.

Here, Las Cruces representatives show us the direct cause the family's death. What you see above is a cemetary, and then a sharp drop-off. A local Catholic Church had recently cut into the ground at the cemetary's edge to begin construction of a small retreat house, here at one of the highest points of this vertical community. They told us that the church had sent four men and their equipment to cut into the hill just days before the storm passed through, and they left the ground exposed. Unfortunately, no one among the four was a construction expert, and El Salvador has no zoning laws that require construction to be legally approved and thus reviewed to ensure safe and responsible practices. The way that the ground had been cut created a small basin in which the rain gathered during the four hours of the storm, until the weight of it was too heavy. The water cut a divot in the ground (visible in the photo at the right) and rushed down, smashing through the retaining wall about 100 ft down and then into the home.

Below, Mirna's brother shows us photos he has set up in a 24-hour shrine to the family, with a statue of the Virgin Mary and candles. One photo features Carlos, Mirna, and Azucena after her recent dance recital.

-- 23 November 2009

2009-11-11T14:46:00.000-08:00

Of the Talmud, and his Rifle.
"Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly, now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it." -- from the Talmud

She is a toothless, chubby cherub of an old woman, her worn floral print nightgown overflowing on her 4.5 foot frame. Her basset hound eyes are barely visible beneath thick round 1960's headlight glasses. She sits at a metal table outside the Mug Cafe. I see her every time I make the short walk here from my office for an afternoon jumpstart, because this table is her office. She sells rosaries. The plastic kind-- lime green, dusty black, made-en-mass. She is one of so many here trying to eek out an honest living selling plastic nothings on the street. As I sit in the cafe and gaze out the window, I notice how she and the khaki-suited guard have built an easy camaraderie, passing a lazy afternoon with her head tilted up toward him, his tilted down, resting on the handle of his rifle. They chat.

I leave my espresso wonderland and pass her table, and the conversation between them halts. I dont have to look at her face to feel those basset hound eyes cajoling me. “Señorita,” she squeaks, “Comprame algo, por favor.” (Buy something from me, please.) The words lilt, automated, just another day of asking for a little to survive her lot in life.

Two evenings ago, the city of San Salvador had a one night stand with psychological terror. Someone sent emails to the major media around the country claiming that, that night, the gangs were going to attack the civilian population. Salvadorans live in one of the most violent countries in the world, and they're aware that life outside high walls and barbed wire is an undeclared street war. A rumor like this is thus real whether or not it happens because it strikes the fount of our fear. It must be taken seriously. At 5pm, it was. People got into buses and cars in a thinly controlled flee for home. Public spaces became ghost towns. Footage on the nightly news of the biggest mall in Central America, Metrocentro, showed one solitary woman dashing for cover between the pillars in the mall´s sparkling central plaza. At the time, I was in a taxi on my way to meet a deadline, bound to a standstill behind miles of taillights. I began to imagine jumping my nervous tapping feet from roof to roof along this continuum of paralyzed cars.

It happens that on this night, not many more people were killed than normal, which means it illustrated El Salvador well. For instance: 6.30pm. Upper-class area of town, outside the Jesuit University of Central America. He was in his mid 30's and he worked with my roommates in an outsourced telephone help center for US companies. While talking on his cell phone with his father, walking down the sidewalk, a car pulls up beside and shoots. His dad, having heard it happen, tries to call back. His son is already dead. When my roommates told me this story they couldn't help but bleed into reminiscing about the multiple other workmates they've lost to random violence. “…Oh, I remember the day we heard about Nelson. That was the day before they promoted me.” In fact, whenever the conversation turns to violence, it becomes a slippery slope of friends, neighbors, family, acquaintances. One aspect of these deaths is clear: they are as normal as promotions. In all places in the world, death is a part of life. What I'm hearing from my roommates is that here, it is a part of youth.

I return to the present moment, and hear her plea. I am Jesuit-educated; I grew up in a place where everyone is to be treated as neighbor; and I believe, desperately, in humanity. Yet the rifle in the crook of his khaki arm gleams in my peripheral vision. I don't even look at her cherub face as I abandon her, and tumble back to the office.
-- October 2009

Yellow Roses

2009-11-09T12:26:00.000-08:00

When I was seven years old, I found a forbidden place in Target. My mother did most of her shopping there and most times toted us along. One day while she was trapped in the check-out line, I wandered to a bulletin board near the door and was caught by a crop of young black-and-white faces: square photos from a school yearbook mounted on a flyer that proclaimed, “Missing.” It didn't make sense. These children were born in the same year that I was, and they looked like normal kids. They looked like me. I was mystified, horrified; the fact that they were not necessarily dead, but missing, was something I couldn't comprehend. In that very moment, they were possibly alive somewhere and doing something normal like buttering toast. Or possibly they weren't. Grappling with “possibly” was like trying again and again, futilely, to push the plastic square block into the circle-shaped hole in my Fisher Price toy. Where were these normal kids? I knew I had walked into something that even mom couldn't explain, and therefore, it was somewhere a seven year old doesn't belong.

Seventeen years later, I found that forbidden place again in the tiny country of El Salvador. I was in a green park, surrounded by about 250 Salvadorans celebrating a holiday called the Day of the Faithful Departed. For Salvadorans, this day is a celebration of life and of death. Families gather in cemeteries to repaint sky blue or pink headstones and leave fresh flowers. Food vendors offer traditional tamales, and dogs and barefoot children run amok amidst it all lapping up sweets that have fallen to the ground. That is how they celebrate the people who have died. Here in the Cuscatlan Park, they remember those who disappeared.

A hunched woman steps to the center of the crowd and gently reaches for the microphone. A yellow rose and a lit candle sprout from her other hand. Gray whisps frame her face and her rickety voice rings clear: “I dedicate this rose to my daughter. In 1980, one month after her high school graduation, the soldiers took her off a bus and we never saw her again.”--A pause--“I remember her always with her books in her arms.” She turns to find her daughter's name among over 35,000 others on a black granite wall behind her. The wall is about 8 feet tall and a half a football field in length, and it is divided into sections by year and by situation; for instance, “1985 Homicides,” or “1987 Massacres.” She finds her daughter's name in the section that says, “1980 Disappeared.”

Her daughter may have been reading on the bus the day that she became one of over 10,000 people who were forcibly “disappeared” during the Salvadoran Civil War, and were never found. The war officially ended sixteen years ago. Her family is one of over 10,000 families who are still searching.

I feet hushed inside, grappling with this woman's brief story. The crowd, however, doesn't react like me. The whole place is alive with movement. I notice one woman crying and another wiping away the firsts’ tears with a bandana. Two teenaged girls click by on high-heels, one sending a text message and the other carrying a framed black-and-white photo of a young man. Someone is buying ice cream from a vendor who has a cooler on wheels, and a woman’s dyed brunette hair bobs animatedly as she whispers to a friend. Two large movie cameras snake about the crowd followed by a crew. I get the feeling that sixteen years has been enough time to build a life on waiting.

One woman in a highlighter-yellow tank-top takes the microphone: “I dedicate this rose to my mother, to my husband, and to my three children, who disappeared in 1985. All I want is to bury them.” The woman is about my mother's age. I am one of three siblings. I feel like I am seven years old again.

A grandmother in navy blue comes toward me as if magnetized. I'm enveloped by her smile, and then her hug. “Peace to you, my precious child,” she whispers, and then moves on. They're reading more names in the background, and now there is a woman singing a verse from her lost son's favorite song. The whole crowd begins to sing. The refrain goes like this: “We’ re still singing. We’re still dreaming. We’ re still waiting.”

-- 8 November 2009
(Photo courtesy of http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Clpc02bTSoQ/Svr_ZsaxkHI/AAAAAAAAABs/IXOErsG2neo/s1600-h/el_salvador_children_war.jpg)

“We Can Make Change Here Too"

2009-11-04T19:32:00.000-08:00

Salvadoran women gather to share hardships and ideas to build the road to change.

She is a petite woman with squared shoulders. A blue pen juts akimbo, business-like, from her thick pony-tail of hair. She stands before a crowd of about forty people and begins: "We're here because we're interested in how you work, in how you face the difficulties of your life, in how you struggle for change. We're here because we believe that organized women make the road to change." Her name is Rosa, and she is a member of the directive council of a Salvadoran organization called CRIPDES, which aids communities in their development efforts. Rosa is speaking to a crowd of women from all over the rural department of Tecoloca, who have gathered for today’s event organized by CRIPDES to share experiences and ideas for surviving in this time of economic hardship.

The women sit tidied together under the overhanging roof of someone’s house, brushed by the light breeze of coffee country. To arrive here, participants have basically taken whatever road leads up: they’re at one of the highest elevation points in the nation, perched where the clouds would float were this not a clear breezy day. The small space makes for an intimate feel despite the fact that many of the women had never met before. In fact, it almost feels like a family reunion, as many participants brought their children or their younger sisters.

Rosa continues, setting the scene with an overview of the Salvadoran woman’s daily reality, drawling along in the smooth Spanish dialect spoken by campesinos in this tiny country. She relates well to her crowd. She talks honestly about the difficulties of life, and it’s quickly obvious why a gathering like this one is so valuable and necessary. She speaks about violence: 10 people are assassinated daily in this country the size of the state of Massachusetts. The World Health Organization agrees with Rosa. It has declared violence an “epidemic” in El Salvador, and has listed it as the most violent country in the Western hemisphere.

Much of this violence is directed specifically against women, in the form of rape, assassination, and spousal abuse. Rosa explains that women are especially vulnerable to this violence because they don't often have the economic mobility to leave abusive or dangerous situations. To make her point, she asks the women to raise their hands if they have a property title in their name. Not a hand moves. "This is why we have to submit ourselves to whatever our husbands say," she went on.

In this way, these women’s time is sucked into hamster wheel-days: constantly running to keep the family healthy, with no extra time to develop their own skills or to organize with their peers. "What do you spend time attending to?" Rosa asks. “The children,” they answer. Cooking. Cleaning. The husband. (The latter sparked hearty laughter.) In addition to this, there aren't many employment opportunities for women. "52% of the population is female. Why is there so little employment for us?” She answers her own question: “Because there are fewer opportunities for women to study than for men. The decision-making jobs go to men." The most common jobs open to women are in maquilas, or mass-production factories owned by large corporations, which pay around $160 per month and are infamous for their subhuman working conditions. To put this salary in perspective, Rosa cites the price of the canasta basica, which is a calculation of the price of basic foodstuffs and necessities like vegetables, corn, basic health care, and basic education needed to nuture a four-person family for one month in El Salvador. It hovers around $700.

In media jargon, this dire situation is known as the international food crisis. Rosa debunks this term. “When you go to the supermarket, there's a mountain of food on the shelves. What is lacking is the money to buy that food.” The women nod in agreement. They know exactly what she’s talking about. “This is not a food crisis,” she continues, “This is a distribution crisis. This is an economic crisis.”

Rosa affirms the women’s central role in overcoming this crisis. "Why do we organize?” she asks. “We organize because when women make a change, that change reaches the children too. It reaches the men. It reaches the chickens. It affects the whole family." She reminds the women that the coming elections in El Salvador give them another opportunity to bring change. She encourages them to vote, to talk to their neighbors about voting. “It's our responsibility, and we can do this,” she says. “Look at the United States. There’s still a big problem with racism there and yet Obama won. If there can be change up there, we can make change down here too.”

The women have nodded, laughed, listened to Rosa’s overview of the national reality. Now, it’s their turn to speak. And the mood shifts: yeah, life’s hard. But we’ve got ideas. And the experience-and-idea sharing begins. Each community that’s present gives a short report of the various projects their women's group has been trying in an effort to make extra income, to spend more time together, and to capacitate women with more skills. The efforts were many and varied. One community works in conjunction with its mayor's office to give capacitation workshops on making candy and piñatas to women. Another works with a San Salvador-based NGO, the Center for Interchange and Solidarity (CIS), on an indigo-dyeing artisan project. The women’s group in a community called Milagro de Dios (Miracle of God) has learned to make soap and shampoo. It has also taken out a microloan with the SHARE Foundation’s Semillas de Esperanza project, receiving seeds for basic vegetables and fertilizer.

A woman with a particularly serious expression on her face and a Chicago Whitesox ballcap stands up to talk. In her gravelly tone she congratulates everyone present, noting that their work is a true acheivement given the obstacles. "And maybe the best part," she says, "is that working together, we know we are not alone."

I wrote this piece in Fall 2008 and am posting it these many months later. Two updates since the writing: El Salvador had its presidential elections, with the Moderate-Leftist candidate, Mauricio Funes, winning on a platform of change. Many compared Funes with Obama. Second, recent statistics of the homicide rate in El Salvador have-- unfortunately--risen. According to the Prensa Grafica newspaper, in October 2009 an average 14 people were killed per day.

The Share Foundation works through three of CRIPDES’ regional outposts—CRIPDES San Vicente, CCR and UCRES—to accompany rural communities as they organize and agitate for a better future. The Semillas de Esperanza (Seeds of Hope) program is a SHARE initiative to combat the global crisis’ effects on El Salvador. Communities receive seeds and fertilizer for plants like peppers, tomatoes, and corn as a microloan. They repay slowly--and dependably-- in installments. For further project and donation information--to join with these women as another reminder that they are not alone-- visit www.share-elsalvador.org/donate/semillasdeesperanza.htm#donate

This Cannot Wait.

2009-08-03T20:13:00.000-07:00

I repost this Action Alert from the Share Foundation about escalating political violence around mining in El Salvador. I was in Cabanas last week with teen-age journalist Jose Beltran (currently being threatened), several government functionaries, and a delegation from Eastern Michigan University. After speaking with Marcelo's brothers we know that this case cannot wait for the slow Salvadoran justice machine to kick into gear. Please support the Radio Victoria team and Marcelo's family members in whatever way that you can.

Look for audio recordings of our meetings in Cabanas, along with photos and more details, in the next few weeks.

Without further ado, here you see the consequences for being a social justice activist in El Salvador.

Action Alert: Contact your Congressperson about the Murder of Marcelo Rivera and Ongoing Death Threats

Please contact your Senators and Congressperson asking them to join an international campaign to pressure Salvadoran authorities to fully investigate the murder of anti-mining activist Marcelo Rivera and the death threats received by other community activists.

Please watch "The Mysterious Death of Marcelo Rivera," a seven-minute documentary by Philadelphia filmmaker Jamie Moffett. The video will give you the background and the circumstances around Marcelo's death. In addition read "Down the Well" an article from the Philadelphia City Paper regarding the crime.

TAKE ACTION!

Contact the Capitol Switchboard 202-224-3121 to call your Congressperson
Visit the "Write your Representative" website to e-mail your Congressperson
Visit the US Senate website to call or e-mail your Senator

Ask your Representatives to:

Call for the Salvadoran authorities to fully investigate the murder of anti-mining activist Marcelo Rivera and ongoing death threats received by other community leaders. Read a letter sent by 108 international organizations to the Salvadoran Acting Attorney General.
Review free trade agreements and eliminate provisions which allow mining corporations to sue countries for denying mining permits. Read the Pacific Rim vs. El Salvador Case.

For talking points please visit Jamie Moffett's campaign. Feel free to copy and paste the suggested message or write your own to include the more recent death treats received by other anti-mining activists. If you are from Pennsylvania you can use Jamie's automatic message to Senator Arlen Specter.

Community Activists in Cabañas are Receiving Death Threats

Less than a month after the assassination of Marcelo Rivera, an increasing number of activists from the northern Department of Cabañas report to be receiving death threats. Like Marcelo, the targeted people have been outspoken against mining and have denounced electoral fraud. They also have called for a full investigation into Marcelo's killing. The death threats seem to be linked to the murder since often they refer that the victims will "end up just like Marcelo." Click here to see a video in Spanish about death threats that activists have received.

The first to receive death threats were three young reporters who work for Radio Victoria. José Beltrán, Ludwing Iraheta and Vladimir Abarca explained in a press conference that after they began to cover the disappearance and murder of Marcelo they started to receive hand written and phone death threats. Radio officials denounced this situation to the police (PNC), the Office of the Human Rights Ombudsman and the Office of the Attorney General.

Radio Victoria is a community broadcaster located in the town of Victoria, Cabañas. The radio run mainly by youth, started in 1993 with the purpose of giving the isolated community, its own means of communication. According to its website, the radio is a "welcoming space where people can make announcements, send greetings, talk about their problems, look for solutions, discuss politics, and share dreams." The radio has played a key role in exposing the Pacific Rim mining project, the municipal and presidential elections and its fraud scandals, and more recently, the murder of Marcelo Rivera.

Father Luis Quintanilla, a progressive Catholic priest and a long time defender of human rights, has received similar threats. One of the threats read "the damned reds [communists] disguised as priests will be finished off," "keep quiet if you don't want to end up like Marcelo," declared the priest in a press release. However, in this case the threats went beyond words. On July 27th Father Quintanilla was driving from Victoria when four armed, hooded men, stopped him and pulled him out of his car to kidnap and murder him. However the priest was able to escape by jumping into a gully.

On July 28th, the Director of the Association for Economic and Social Development (ADES), a non-profit operating in Cabañas, was also threatened. Later, Isabel Gomez, head of the news team at Radio Victoria received a threatening call in the press room. When the second to last person left the radio, Isabel received the call in which the aggressor acknowledged the fact that she was alone at the radio. Isabel's house was also broken into and vandalized.

As time goes on, the list of threatened people continue to grow. By July 30th all the staff from Radio Victoria had been threatened. The radio was also sabotaged. The radio antenna in Sensuntepeque (Cabañas' main city) was stolen and the electrical system was sabotaged causing the transmitter to fail. Therefore the radio has been on and off the air. The lives of the staff members have been disrupted as they have had to change their daily routines and look for refuge. However they are still working and struggling to keep the radio on air. As one of the staff members said "they will not silence us; we know that our people accompany us and that we will continue forward, because we believe that another Cabañas is possible." Our friends from the area informed us that many community members are volunteering to guard and protect the radio at night. Police officers are also present.

In a press conference the Salvadoran Human Rights Ombudsman, Oscar Luna, called on the Attorney General Office and the National Civil Police (PNC) to investigate and find the material and intellectual authors of these death threats and bring them to justice. He urged the authorities to take steps to protect the lives of the victims.

ADES Santa Marta stated in a press release that "ultra-right wing groups linked to organized crime groups are trying to keep the population of the Department in a state of terror and are making lethal attacks against social leaders and political and environmental activists. The negligence of the Public Prosecutor and the Police at the Departmental level favors, reinforces, and shelters these violations." ADES also called on the international community to pressure the Salvadoran authorities to investigate these human rights violations.

PLEASE TAKE ACTION TO PROTECT OUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS OF CABAÑAS!

Claudia Rodríguez. - Policy Director

The View from the Apartment Window

2009-06-08T19:32:00.000-07:00

I am standing at the window of a second-story apartment, my hands on the white metal bars separating the quiet of her square room from the streets of the capitol, my chin nestled and my eyes roving the outside world. These moments to observe the streets are rare and valuable here. When you´re walking down there, you must move quickly, vigilant, accompanied by the persistent possibilities of “what could happen.” Except in very few upper-class neighborhoods, enjoying the city vista must be done from behind bars. I spend delicious moments at this window feasting on the pedestrians, vehicles, and houses across the street. On this particular Saturday late-morning, it was the latter that caught my attention.

Tipsy, bulging rain-clouds totter full of wet promise overhead. I see a small boy, perhaps 7 or 8 years old, walk to the third-story window of the pastel peach house and pause to peer sky-ward. Standing straight-tall, he smoothly slides shut the glass panels, locks them, tidies the lace curtains and pivots gracefully back into his morning. At the red stucco house next door, a Chocolate Lab climbs from the garage where two bright white SUVs are eternally parked, up countless mansion stairs to the elevated front door.

What´s strange about this moment is that I´ve not once seen movement in these houses. No vehicles entering or leaving; no figures sweeping or cooking or paying taxes; just an occasional lit room at night—and even then, not a shadow thrown. The only noise is the barking of the Lab protecting his Red Stucco. These are beautiful houses—large especially by Salvadoran standards—and they´ve always seemed sadly abandoned. Thus, I was surprised to see life that day. In addition, the boy´s air of responsibility shocked me. He looked in charge. Maybe, I thought, these houses are so quiet because only the boy and the Lab reside there. The responsible mini-man may as well be wearing a little sport coat and little loafers, after having cooked himself a little steak-and-Cabernet supper.

Though this appears a fall into fantasy, it is how the world often feels in El Salvador. This volcano kingdom resembles Alice in Wonderland in its surreal, uncontrollable character. The people born into mansions generally have as much responsibility for their lot in life as those born into rotting tin slums. The “correct” world order as defined by Western standards—one of logic and justice—doesn´t explain the way the chips fall.

Take, for instance, the scene at any intersection of two main streets. It is a veritable carnival. Lanky men and women walk from car to car at red lights selling knock-off Oakleys and cashews. Beside them, the street-browned shoulder blades of a shirtless young man flex as he lifts a carton of gasoline to his sun-burned lips, and he spits it in a stream into the rod of fire he holds, sending a massive flame into the air: “fire breathing.” He follows the Oakleys to beg drivers for a few cents in return for the stop-light entertainment. He is almost certainly homeless.

Danger and safety, possible and impossible, right and wrong mesh into each other so unrecognizably that to settle into life here as a foreigner, you must just give up your expectations for what you call safe, or possible, or right. It´s not that life in El Salvador is objectively wrong: in fact, it calls into question the very existence of an objective right and wrong. For instance, that young fire-breather probably is high on glue. Most young street boys are; and you’ll often find them sprawled and sleeping as any long-limbed teen does, except barefoot in the middle of the sidewalk at noon. In my fourth grade DARE drug education class, Officer Mike told me that drugs are bad because they cause you to make bad decisions. True. Sometimes. Glue gives this boy the guts to kiss fire—or, seen in another way, to coax enough coins from passers-by that he can afford to eat.

Get a safer job, we say to him. But let’s follow him around for a day, or any one of thousands of jobless young Salvadoran men, and let’s watch the puzzle-pieces of alienation come together. There’s police abuse in random stop-and-searches that normally involve being handcuffed, slammed into the concrete, and ridiculed. I saw it happen to a group of four young men in baggy jeans the other day on my walk to work. It was 10 A.M., and waitresses at the surrounding restaurants continued serving fresh steaming coffee to their customers. There’s just plain murder. El Salvador is the most deadly place on earth for young people to live: 70% of homicide victims are youth between the ages of 15 and 24. That rate is 30 times that of anywhere in Europe. There are employers who will not hire them. The United Nations Development Programme says that 62.4% of young Salvadorans are unemployed or underemployed. There are employers who choose not to pay them come check-time. (See story below about “Roberto”.) There are the daily scenes on the streets: taxi drivers who refuse to give young guys a ride. Crowds that avert eyes or cross the street because that kid might be a gang member (which, ironically, is one of few places where young men are accepted.) There’s the lack of opportunity: perhaps the most reliable Salvadoran public opinion-polling institute, the University Institute of Public Opinion (IUDOP), found that only 9.8% of young people these days have a university or technical education. Almost one-fourth have only gone through primary school.

So, is glue bad when it’s your meal ticket? In my white US citizen, middle-class, college-educated reality, my knee-jerk response might once have been judging the young fire-breather for not making better decisions—not making “right” decisions. But my view of the Salvadoran streets forces me to open my vision and see beyond my privileges.

(My "footnotes" application is currently not working. Statistical information taken from these sources: www.crin.org/violence/search/closeup.asp?infoID=19081, and http://ipsnews.net/sendnews.asp?idnews=44481)

Flying by the Seat of your Bus: Losing Control, and Coping in the Salvadoran Way

2009-05-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

We are crammed into the weaving minibus, about forty of us in a space meant for twenty, sitting or standing as our luck allowed. Strangers to each other, we are riding route 44 through San Salvador evening traffic; and, judging by the many heavy eyes and slumping shoulders, work has taken its toll today. In usual minibus etiquette, the driver zooms frantically around stalled traffic. He somehow finds (or forces) enough holes that he maintains a speed of nearly 50 miles per hour on this narrow city avenue crawling with cars. The deep bass of our blaring reggaeton music shakes the bus’s wobbly metal side panels. I watch with eyebrows raised as the cobrador—the driver’s assistant who stands at the side door to take passage fares—leans impossibly far out the open door and knocks on the roof of the minibus flying beside us. He waggles his tongue at the competing driver. I hear the two old and abused motors heave as accelerators jam to floorboards and the race begins. I laugh softly: the closest thing I know to this moment is the videogame Grand Theft Auto. I am distinctly aware that I have no control of my fate until my feet touch ground again.

In my US culture, control of my circumstances worked in same way that many things do in lives of relative privilege—it was something to enjoy in moderation, and something not to obsess about having. "Don't be a 'control freak,' Danielle.” Read: control was like chocolate. Accessible to me, and something I had the luxury to deny myself. I compare my quiet, sturdy family car to the thumping beasts that transport most Salvadorans to the grocery store or to work. Many Salvadorans cannot afford to own a car. They must risk the real-life video game. Gripping the seat-back in front of me on the 44 is a lesson for me in losing control—oftentimes to the point of injustice—as a daily experience.

There are many aspects of life here that leave Salvadorans with little control. For instance, my friend “Roberto”[1] is a 28-year old construction worker in the countryside. He operates a large and complicated paving machine, which few are trained to use in this tiny country. On a regular basis, his boss refuses to pay him. Roberto has lately been thinking of immigrating North via coyote because he knows there is no recourse for him here. The justice system operates on impunity, he explains to me. In fact, just 4% of cases ever make it to court[2]. He is struggling to support his wife and two young sons, and the likelihood of finding another job is slim. Roberto does not want to leave his family, so in one last effort, he and his wife have opened up a tiny store in their sheet-metal home. They see a local source of snacks, soap, and telephone cards as a way to support their community as well as to make a small profit.

Roberto’s story highlights not only lack of control, but also the response that I’m finding is common to Salvadorans facing injustices like this: seeking a solution in community. In another example, when a Canadian mining company called Pacific Rim began to explore northern El Salvador for possible open-pit mining for silver and gold, communities reacted. They know that open-pit mining requires the use of cyanide and the rerouting of major water sources in their tiny country. Experts tell them that after about five years of mining they would be left with environmental damage lasting hundreds of years, chemically-caused diseases in people and animals, and only a small percentage of the profit. The majority of the money would flow to Pacific Rim’s coffers.[3] Salvadorans know that this is what happens because it has already happened to their neighbors in Honduras, who were not able to keep foreign companies out. Salvadoran countryside communities, churches, schools, and families have protested time and time again since Pacific Rim began exploration in 2002; and in 2008, they achieved a true miracle: the free trade-addicted Salvadoran government proclaimed that it would not allow open-pit mining in its territory.[4]

Yet, in this world where money tends to buy control, Pacific Rim wants the last word. On April 30, 2009, the company filed a case against the Salvadoran government for “hundreds of millions of dollars” in lost potential profit, their legal recourse under the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). Under an identical clause in a similar free trade agreement, NAFTA, a US waste-disposal company that was refused permission to reopen a toxic waste disposal facility in an ecological protected zone in Mexico was awarded $16.7million for lost profit, and the Mexican state was forced to allow the company to dump.[5] It remains to be seen what will happen to El Salvador—and those who would be most affected by the decision, ordinary Salvadorans, once again have no control. In the meantime, they continue gathering to build morale and rally for their rights.

The way that Salvadorans respond to these injustices empowers me. Their community organization says: lack of control is not weakness. It might humble you, but it does not mean that you can give up. In fact, it is an invitation: to come together as a community, to build relationships with neighbors, to demand dignity. Whether packed together on buses or in protests, we seek solutions together.

[1] Name changed to protect privacy
[2] Statistic from the Tutela Legal, the human rights office of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Salvador

[3] http://esnomineria.blogspot.com/2008/11/articulos-de-prensa.html
[4] http://thesharefoundation.blogspot.com/2009_04_01_archive.html

[5] http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/977

Happy Six Months. I hope you were serious about that "grit" thing. Love, El Salvador.

2008-12-04T19:06:00.001-08:00

I don't intend to do this often, but I'm about to embark on a brief personal update.

Today is the six month anniversary of Danielle's Big Move to El Salvador. In celebration, El Salvador has given me a gift that calls my bluff on that whole bit about having "grit." Or maybe it's the "grace" part. Anyhow, yesterday, I was diagnosed with Typhoid Fever.

Now, before anyone gets too worried about the disease with one of those names we only hear about in lists of things that George Washington Carver eradicated with his peanuts (or something like that): I have a milder form, and we caught it early. I'm officially on bed rest for 14 days. Unofficially, I expect to be up-and-at-'em in about a half hour.

I hope to use some of this time off to blog. That would be great, because there's a few points to be made here about the accessibility of modern medicine for people in my position who aren't being paid a foreigner's salary. In fact: let's do this now. My medicine cost me $110. Add that to the taxis I've taken to the hospital every day for the past three days to get this thing diagnosed ($18), and to the cost of the blood test that was inconclusive ($30), and to the fees for medical consultations ($40) and to the lost opportunity cost of being out of work for nearly three weeks. You arrive somewhere in the neighborhood of $498 dollars.

According to Equipo Maiz, a Salvadoran social research organization, the average factory worker here makes $162 dollars monthly. Factory work is common employment in El Salvador, especially for women who support families. The factories are allowed to pay what they do because they exist under the terms of the free trade agreement, CAFTA, negotiated by men and women in business suits who represent the interests of large corporations. In economic speak, these factories are called "foreign investment." The Salvadoran government needs to pander to this type of investment if it wishes to win the Neoliberal economic game. The logic that guides free trade treaties is that eventually, the profit generated by the sale of these many products produced cheaply will create more worldwide wealth (a "bigger pie"), which in 20 or 50 years should then trickle back to the men and women laboring in the factories and everyone will have what they need. Being able to afford to treat Typhoid Fever in the meantime doesn't get much play at the negotiating table.

In our world in the US, we already understand why Neoliberalism looks attractive to the business suits. Now, we might understand how an alternative to Neoliberalism could look attractive to someone making $162 a month who has a child with Typhoid.

So there you have not only a personal update, but also a rant that was-- quite literally-- feverish. Just call me Typhoid Mary.

-4 December 2008

Gabriel

2008-11-24T20:17:00.000-08:00

Invierno. Rainy season. It's an uncharacteristically dry day, and hot. Gabriel just got back from an ice cream outing with his mom and he's knocking on my metal door. We don't really know each other yet, Gabriel and I. I am still the strange new foreigner living in his apartment complex, and he is still the serious little boy who has been creating daily reasons to get as close as possible to my white and gray kitten, Momo. The thick clank of his 8 year old fish-bone fist on my door is the most overt move he's made yet.

"Traigo helado para su gatito," he says to my amused smile. "I've brought ice cream for your kitten." He quickly adds, "And for you, too." We don't discuss names yet because that's beyond the point. I want to know how he figured that a hyperactive kitten should eat ice cream for lunch. He explains that Momo is a cat, cats like milk, and ice cream has a lot of milk in it. It makes sense. I've since come to know that, when Gabriel isn't asking questions, he's explaining his world-- which he does in matter-of-fact syllogisms just like that one. He's a sincere and thoughtful child; and though Momo was certainly his first friend in my apartment, I was fast his second.

Gabriel had been observing Momo in the weeks leading up to that ice cream afternoon, learning to understand him. His mind's linear trip from cat to ice cream shows that he wanted to care for his new furry friend. He spends time learning to understand me, too. He's patient with the fact that I'm not nearly as cute or fun as Momo, and he knows that he must unravel my mysterious foreigner world with words. Afternoons pass with his little legs crossed indian-style on my doorstep, soft orderly questions marching off his tongue. They've clearly been ruminating in his mind. "Why do you talk like you do?" (referring to my accented and odd Spanish.) "How did you talk to your parents when you were a kid if you are just now learning how to talk?" (I spoke English when I was little, Gabriel. My parents speak English too.) "Oh. They don't speak Spanish?" (Nope.) "Then how do they talk to other people?" (Well, people speak English in the US like they speak Spanish here in El Salvador.) "Oh. Do they make movies in English too?" His questions roll on as the reality of a multi-lingual world dawns in Gabriel's understanding. His brow furrows and eyes brighten. He's loving this.

I'm in awe of this little boy's vision. Where I see an exhaustingly complicated reality full of structural -isms, Gabriel sees a world he can get to the bottom of, and make friends with. He, like most children, has not yet lost his wisdom.

I'm completely convinced that children and old folk are the only clairvoyant ones. The rest of us swim around in our fears and mixed-up priorities until we learn to float, smiling eyes to the sky, the way we were born and the way we will go.

-written 25 August '08

About this Blog

2008-11-24T19:58:00.001-08:00

24 November 2008

Annie usually says it best:

"How can people think that artists seek a name? A name, like a face, is something you have when you're not alone. There is no such thing as an artist: there is only the world, lit or unlit as the light allows. When the candle is burning, who looks at the wick? When the candle is out, who needs it? ... What can any artist set on fire but her world? What can any people bring to the altar but all it has ever owned in the thin towns or over the desolate plains?"
- A. Dillard, Holy the Firm

May my world be aflame.