Third environmentalist murdered in El Salvador in 2009

Another environmental activist has been murdered in the department of Cabañas. This follows by just five days the murder of Ramiro Rivera, another leader in the fight against gold-mining in that part of the country:

SAN SALVADOR – An environmentalist was murdered and one of her small children wounded over the weekend in a rural area in Cabañas, a province in central El Salvador, raising to three the number of activists killed this year, environmental groups said.

Dora Recinos Sorto was gunned down Saturday [December 26] in an area of the Trinidad district, where environmentalist Ramiro Rivera and a 57-year-old women riding in a vehicle with him were killed on Dec. 21.

“She was shot five times in the back,” Cabañas environmental committee coordinator Francisco Pineda told Efe, adding that Recinos Sorto was the wife of another environmentalist.

The 32-year-old woman, who was pregnant, was with the youngest of her six children at the moment of the attack, Pineda said.

The child “was wounded, but is now out of danger,” Pineda told state-owned Radio Nacional El Salvador.

“She was eight-months pregnant and even that didn’t stop these people from killing her,” Pineda said.

The baby that Recinos Sorto was carrying also died.

The attack was “undeniably” linked to her work against the mining exploration and extraction going on in Cabañas, Pineda said.(more).

A story from a Canadian paper pointed to tensions in the regions of the department of Cabanas where gold mining company Pacific Rim wants to opoerate:

[T]ension between the anti-and pro-mining groups appears not to have abated. In the last 10 days, two members of Cabanas Environment Committee, an environmental group opposed to the opening of a mine, have been killed. Dora Recinos Sorto, who was eight months pregnant, was killed on Saturday. The youngest of her six children, a son whose age has not been confirmed, was shot in the foot. A second activist, Ramiro Rivera, was killed Dec. 21. Another anti-mining activist, Marcelo Rivera (no relation) was kidnapped and killed in June, according to news reports.

The presence of Pacific Rim "has really split a community which has a long history of violence," said Clinton Carter, a consultant with Washington, D.C.-headquartered Frontier Strategy Group, which helps companies assess the risk of doing business in emerging markets.

Some groups would support the mine and they would view the anti-mine activists as jeopardizing their livelihood, Carter said. "That is the kind of very tricky local situation that these companies are wading into," he said.

That's especially true in a small community where there are big expectations about what jobs and income a mine could bring, Carter said.

"So if there is a very vocal faction opposed to it sitting alongside those who are suffering pretty high unemployment and pretty low standards of living, I think that has a potential to really polarize communities."

And that would be something Pacific Rim "wouldn't be able to control or predict," he said.

In an article in ContraPunto, the FMLN and the country's Human Rights Ombudsman Oscar Luna demanded that the National Police and the Attorney General's office conduct a thorough investigation. Luna criticized the police authorities for serious omissions and failing to conduct investigations with due diligence. He decried the authorities failure to protect the environmentalists who had faced increasing threats in the past months. In a statement reported in La Prensa Grafica, Luna said the PNC had been negligent in its investigations of the attacks on the environmentalists.

The archbishop of San Salvador, José Escobar Alas, stated that "We need to know who are the authors of these crimes."

The subdirector of investigations, Augusto Cotto, also stated in the Contra Punto article that there was a clear nexus between the murders of Ramiro Rivera Gómez and Dora Alicia Recino Sorto. He pointed to the fact that both were clearly planned out in advance and conducted by hitmen.

The blog at Voices on the Border republished an email threat which it said had been circulated shortly before the most recent murder:

Our friends in Cabanas received more death threats yesterday from an unidentified individual or group claiming responsibility for the murders of Marcelo Rivera and Ramiro Rivera. The email read, as translated:

“we sent 2 into the hole, now the question is, who will be the third, maybe Father Luis or one from the radio, not a bad idea to continue with one of those big mouths at radio victoria, we are not playing around we demonstrated that we have the logistic capacity and financing to deal with whoever, it doesn’t matter if you have a battalion of police taking care of you like dogs, we will do it when we like, the deaths will continue and no one can stop the vengeance that’s begun, we prefer that the 3rd be someone at the “pinche” radio, we are not playing around, this is the new wave of warnings after taking care of Ramiro”

The murders have energized the activist community to demand a response. Voices on the Border stated it eloquently:

Marcelo, Ramiro, and Alicia courageously continued to voice their concerns and defend their communities while receiving death threats. They did more than participate in and lead an anti-mining movement; they shouldered El Salvador’s burgeoning civil society and young democracy. Those who cower in the shadows making threats and killing pregnant women have tried to silence these three voices. We must now stand with our friends in Cabañas to ensure that the voices of Marcelo, Ramiro, and Alicia continue to be heard, and that others around the country follow in their path of choosing words, civility, and democracy over violence, brutality, and intimidation.

You can get more information from Democracy Now and Upside Down World. Voices on the Border is running a fact finding mission to El Salvador from February 6-14, which you can learn more about here.

Funes popularity remains very high

President Mauricio Funes continues to have very high popularity in El Salvador after 6 months in office. A recent Mitofsky poll reported in Angus Reid Global Monitor
finds that 88.2% of Salvadorans approve of the way Funes is doing his job. That's up 4% since August.

Fireworks injuries still afflict the smallest in El Salvador

Despite the efforts of campaigns like the video above to keep fireworks away from children, the tragedy continues. Thirteen children were hospitalized with burns from fireworks over Christmas Eve in El Salvador. The tragic injuries to children occur year after year as a result of the tradition of shooting off fireworks on Christmas Eve and New Years Eve.

It's probably unrealistic to think this issue will change any time soon. But maybe if there is greater awareness of the human cost, more publicity campaigns, and parents who take responsibility, these holiday tragedies will begin to diminish.

Words from Christmas Eve -- 30 years ago

Photo of nativity scene taken December 2005
at the chapel at Divina Providencia in San Salvador.

God keeps on saving in history.
And so, in turning once again
to the episode of Christ’s birth at Bethlehem,
we come not to recall Christ’s birth twenty centuries ago,
but to live that birth here,
in the twentieth century, this year,
in our own Christmas here in El Salvador.
By the light of these Bible readings
we must continue all the history
that God has in his eternal mind,
even to the concrete events
of our abductions,
of our tortures,
of our own sad history.
That is where we are to find our God.

Words of Archbishop Oscar Romero
Christmas Eve, 1979, three months before he was assassinated in the chapel where the photo above was taken.

Another anti-mining activist killed

Another environmental leader, active in anti-mining protests and other issues, has been killed in the department of Cabañas. From the Latin American Herald Tribune:

Prominent environmental activist Ramiro Rivera, who survived an attempt on his life in August, was killed last weekend in the central Salvadoran province of Cabañas, a colleague said.

“It was an ambush,” Francisco Pineda, coordinator of the environmental committee in Cabañas, told Efe.

Rivera was fatally shot Sunday while driving to his home in the city of Ilobasco. Also killed was a 57-year-old woman traveling in the same vehicle, while a girl of 13 was wounded.

The attack happened even though Rivera “traveled with security” since the failed assassination attempt of Aug. 7, Pineda said. He said Rivera played a leading role in battles against proposed mining projects in the region.

“We see that the fundamental cause (of the murder) can only be his being against those projects and in defense of the lives of present and future generations,” Pineda said of his murdered colleague. He added that he and four other environmental activists in Cabañas have been threatened.

El Salvador’s minister of justice, Manuel Melgar, said Rivera’s killing was “very probably” a planned assault and not “a common robbery,” Colatino newspaper said on its Web site.

National police director Carlos Ascencio said investigators are seeking a possible connection between this week’s slaying and the June murder of environmentalist Marcelo Rivera.

A denunciation of the murder from one of the anti-mining groups was carried in Upside Down World. Diario CoLatino today quoted police officials stating that the murder was clearly planned and took the form of an ambush along the route that Rivera was travelling on Sunday.

President Mauricio Funes today assured that the murder of the environmentalist would not be left in impunity. Funes also confirmed that Rivera was with two officers of the witness and victim protection division at the time of the shooting. (Apparently they're not very good at their jobs).

The repeated failure of the PNC under previous administrations to solve murders, and to present an acceptable answer when politically active people are killed, contributes greatly to fear and polarization in El Salvador. Time and time again, PNC spokesmen would blame murders on "common crime," and the resolution would satisfy no one. The pre-meditated ambush killing of Ramiro Rivera will be difficult to dismiss as just another example of El Salvador's violent crime problem.

More arrests in Poveda murder case

More than three months after the murder of French journalist Christian Poveda, police have arrested 10 more gang members for the crime. Poveda's most recent work was the documentary La Vida Loca, an unflinching portrait of youths caught up in El Salvador's gang culture, and the release of that film appears to have prompted the killing. According to an AP story:

"The information we have is that some gang members did not approve of the way it (the documentary) was done, and the way it was shown," [police commissioner Augusto] Cotto told a news conference.

What they didn't like, he said, was the fact that "in the documentary they were put out in public, their illegal acts were made public, the consumption of drugs, that increased a leadership struggle in the gang ... that had already been under way for a long time."...

He said police officer Jose Napoleon Espinoza — who allegedly collaborated with gang members and received money from extortion schemes — had told the Mara 18 that Poveda was giving police information on the gang, something Cotto said "is totally false."

The day he was killed, Poveda set out to visit the gang-dominated Soyapango area to arrange an interview with female gang members for journalists from a French fashion magazine.

The suspects allegedly decided to kill the filmmaker.

La Prensa Grafica has a longer article purporting to describe more of the gang members planning of the murder of the filmmaker they had allowed to live among them for more than a year.

The Coffee Harvest

After a three month absence from blogging, Stephanie is back writing at The Plantation Diaries. She is in the middle of the coffee and corn harvest at Finca de Angeles, and her recent posts share stories and pictures of the work. Here's an excerpt:

After breakfast, the women strapped their baskets to their waists held by a sling around their neck. Beto called the women in the order they showed up. I was surprised to find out how well planned the work is. I was always under the impression that the pickers just worked an area, harvesting which ever tree suited them. The coffee trees like most crops are planted in evenly spaced rows. Beto assigned one women at the beginning of every row. That would be their work line for the day. Meanwhile the children ran around delighted to have such open spaces to play. Their only task in helping their mothers, was to carry spare empty sacks and water bottles. We do not employ child labor here!

Before walking away from the field this morning, I turned around to see the tops of coffee trees dancing and shaking while the women invisibly picked the beans. It made me think of a harvest dance and even the trees could join in. I'm sure if I was a tree, I would dance a little myself at the thought of being free of all those beans. I could look forward to a period of rest. After all, this was a hard year with the early rains and hurricane Ida. (Read more).

You are now able to order coffee grown Finca de Angeles online. Get it here. I ordered mine and I can't wait to try it.

Tony Saca -- good riddance

The ARENA political party, which had governed El Salvador for 20 years from 1989-2009, today voted to expel from its ranks former president Tony Saca, who left office just 6 months ago. Former president Alfredo Cristiani announced that Saca was expelled for betraying the principles of the party, including instigating the recent defection of 12 ARENA deputies in the legislature. The party blames Saca for hand-picking Rodrigo Avila as its 2009 presidential candidate, and then losing to Mauricio Funes in the March presidential election.

Meanwhile, the conservative El Diario de Hoy, has published an investigative report revealing that Saca's presidential office spent $219 million more than was budgeted by the National Assembly. The spending by the presidency was out of proportion to all other sectors of the Salvadoran government -- Saca's spending on goods and services was greater than the spending of the ministries of health and education combined. While the ministry of health was running out of money for medicines in the hospitals, Saca spent $83 million on publicity for his presidency.

Remittances to El Salvador Drop

Remittances from abroad are one of the main drivers of El Salvador's economy, and this year that flow of money is down more than 9%:

SAN SALVADOR – Remittances from emigrants, most of them in the United States, fell 9.3 percent in the first 11 months of this year compared with the same period in 2008, El Salvador’s central bank said Thursday.

Salvadoran households received $3.13 billion from relatives abroad between Jan. 1 and Nov. 30, down $321.7 million from last year’s level, the Banco Central de la Reserva said in a statement.

For El Salvador to recover from the economic downturn, the US economy will need to recover and produce jobs for Salvadorans living in the US.

Nominee for US Ambassador to El Salvador

President Obama has nominated Mari Del Carmen Aponte, a lawyer and former president of the Hispanic National Bar Association, to be the next US Ambassador to El Salvador. Her background:

Mari Del Carmen Aponte is currently an attorney and independent consultant with Aponte Consulting. From 2001-2004, Ms. Aponte was the Executive Director of the Puerto Rican Federal Affairs Administration (PRFAA). Prior to that, she practiced law for nearly twenty years with Washington D.C. based law firms. Ms. Aponte also served as a member of the Board of Directors of the National Council of La Raza and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. She is also a member of the Board of the University of the District of Columbia and Rosemont College. She served as president of the Hispanic National Bar Association; the Hispanic Bar Association of the District of Columbia; and is a member of the District of Columbia Judicial Nominations Commission. In 2005, she was also elected to the Board of Directors of Oriental Financial Group (NYSE-OFG). In 1979, as a White House Fellow, Ms. Aponte was Special Assistant to the United States Housing and Urban Development Secretary Moon Landrieu. Ms. Aponte has a B.A. in Political Science from Rosemont College, a M.A. in Theatre from Villanova University, and a J.D. from Temple University.

My best wishes and congratulations to Ms. Aponte.

The rise and fall of ARENA

A guest submission from occasional contributor to this blog, Carlos X. Colorado.


When Mauricio Funes won the presidency of El Salvador for the FMLN, the notion that the executive would be held by any party other than the Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA) was so foreign to analysts, that many wondered aloud if the party that had ruled El Salvador since the Cold War era would hand over power willingly. Today, the idea that President Funes could be troubled by the persistent power of ARENA seems downright laughable. Let us say it: in the political firmament of El Salvador, ARENA is an imploded star.

The once dominant party of the post-Civil War era which produced five consecutive presidents of El Salvador, finds itself in shambles today. Defeat at the polls quickly led to finger pointing and to bitter recriminations that laid bare decades of family feuds. After a dramatic defection of a third of its deputies in the National Assembly, the party that had been feared as a formidable adversary of Mr. Funes was relegated to a noisy -- but puny -- foe. As Mr. Funes pushes though his first major legislative package (fiscal reform), ARENA is isolated in its opposition to the new law. All the other parties are voting against ARENA and with the Funes plan, including the ARENA defectors. Recent reports reveal that the party is deep in debt, and other press stories have let out embarrassing tales of corruption during the ARENA years. Astonishingly, even the fallout from recent flooding was mostly directed restropectively at ARENA and not to the party whose officials were on the job.

How did it get this bad? To many, ARENA was bad news from the start. The party's founder former Major Roberto D'Aubuisson was found by a U.N. Truth Commission to have organized death squads that assassinated tens of thousands of civilians, including Archbishop Oscar Romero. More recently, the party's first president, Alfredo Cristiani, has been accused of participating in the 1989 assassination of six Jesuit priests and their housekeepers at Central American University -- although those accusations have not yet been vetted in a judicial proceeding, nor by independent observers. According to the U.N. Truth Commission Report, the idea of ARENA was a confluence in search for an organizing principle. D'Aubuisson married the oligarchy's fear of losing power with the U.S.' fear that the oligarchy would lose power to international Communism, and -- voilà -- the Alliance was born. But, will the party dissolve now that its raison d'être is gone? If so, it would not be the first time that a major Salvadoran party disintegrated and disappeared from the scene.

When ARENA came to power, it did so by displacing the PDC, which had been the target of a fierce ARENA campaign. Salvadorans who lived through the era will recall the sinister TV spots with Major D'Aubuisson hacking a watermelon in half to compare it to the PDC, whose color was green. But, D'Aubuisson would accuse: only green on the outside, and actually red on the inside. In its heyday, the PDC's grip the everyman was so strong that a well-known campaign slogan was "Duarte aunque no me harte" ("[I would vote for] Duarte even if I should starve"). But after its 1989 loss, the PDC succumbed to a series of internal crises and public perception of widespread corruption within the party -- the situation ARENA finds itself in, today.

In reality, it's too early to declare ARENA's demise. The powerful business and upper class interests behind its machine are strong enough to ride out the current storm. But, they can be scattered by the winds of a new day. Initial indications would suggest that some kind of realignment is already underway.

Video on environmental risk in El Salvador

As the climate change summit in Copenhagen opens, Salvadoran Ecological Unity (UNES) relased a video about environmental risks and climate change in El Salvador. It's worth a look.

Link to video.

Totaling the costs

It is beginning to be possible to total the cost of last month's flooding and landslides in El Salvador. Beyond the 199 lives lost (with 77 people still missing) and some 1900 houses destroyed or greatly damaged, there are economic costs from the destruction of bean and grain crops as well as damage to roads, bridges and other infrastructure. From the Latin American Herald Tribune:

SAN SALVADOR – Full recovery from the early-November floods and mudslides that devastated much of El Salvador and left 199 people dead will require spending at least $343 million, an official with the U.N. Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean said on Friday.

That figure includes the cost of efforts to reduce the risk from future weather disasters, ECLAC regional councilor Ricardo Zapata told a press conference in San Salvador.

Reporting on the preliminary findings of an international commission named to survey the damage from last month’s storms, he said the floods and mudslides caused $239 million in losses.

While $135 million of that total was damage to homes and infrastructure, the remainder took the form of lost revenues due to the disruption of economic activities, Zapata said.

The economic impact of future natural emergencies “can be reduced through planning for disasters and investments in prevention,” the ECLAC official said.

Natural disasters, he told Efe, “don’t affect the entire population in the same way, they affect in a much more intense way the population that has fewer resources and less capacity for response.”

Zapata also cited El Salvador’s long history of suffering major economic losses from climate events, earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

He urged the country to “invest appropriately” in reducing the physical and social vulnerability of the population.

For a more detailed report of the situation in the country, see the United Nations status report from November 26 at this link.

Soto's mother-in-law cleared

According to EFE, a court in El Salvador has acquitted the mother-in-law of U.S. trade unionist Gilberto Soto, from charges she was the intellectual author of his 2004 murder. The court decided to acquit Rosa Zelaya de Ortiz, mother-in-law of Soto because there insufficient evidence and because of contradictions in the testimony of one witness who allegedly had knowledge of planning the crime.

Soto was a Salvadoran born Teamster from New Jersey. While in El Salvador in 2004, he was gunned down outside his mother's home. The police called it a domestic dispute, arresting gang members allegedly hired by Soto's mother-in-law. Others were sure that it was related to his union organizing efforts among truckers in El Salvador's ports. But recently, the focus has been on connections to drug-trafficking and a criminal cartel known as the Perrones. Mauricio Funes ordered the Soto case be reopened earlier this year,

The FMLN, Funes and 21st Century Socialism

During his presidential campaign, Mauricio Funes always dressed in a white shirt, while his running mate for vice president, Salvador Sánchez Cerén always wore the red of the FMLN. The message was clear -- Funes was distancing himself from the traditional hard-line FMLN of Sánchez Cerén. As president, Funes is finding he still needs to draw those distinctions.

Sánchez Cerén was in Venezuela at the end of November for the First International Gathering of Parties of the Left, and the Extraordinary Congress of the United Socialist Party of Venezuela. In a speech to the assembled socialist partisans, Sánchez Cerén strongly supported the program of Hugo Chavez to create a Fifth Socialist International and spoke against the "imperialist" designs of the United States. El Salvador's vice president stated:

The peoples of Latin America must unite because the Empire has a desperate attitude of wanting to return to rescue its presence on the continent, but the aspiration of peoples is to want to change towards a different route.

These public pronouncements of Sánchez Cerén led Mauricio Funes to publicly differ with him, stating that the government of El Salvador neither shares nor supports the views of the FMLN pronounced in Caracas. In response, Sánchez Cerén told the press that he had been speaking only in his role as a senior official of the FMLN, and not in his role as the vice president. He acknowledged that only the president could set the course of the foreign policy of El Salvador.

For its part, there is no doubt that the official policy of the FMLN is to support the creation of a Fifth Socialist International, as described in a recent statement on the party's website, where the party committed itself to advance principles of democratic socialism.