Conflict continues in gold mining region

There has been a troubling resurgence of violence and threats of violence in the Cabañas region of El Salvador, where gold mining companies want to open mines. Those mining plans have been blocked by the Salvadoran government and a strong environmental movement. In 2009, three anti-mining activists were murdered in Cabañas. The police eventually arrested and convicted several people for the crimes, blaming the killings on gangs and a family feud. The victims' role as leaders of the anti-mining movement has been discounted by the authorities as a motive. But members of the activist community have continued to call on the police and prosecutors to pursue the intellectual authors of the crimes.

During 2010, the violence appeared to have subsided somewhat, but the anti-mining movement reports a new wave of murders and threats with possible links to their struggle:

In the middle of the night on January 11, a written death threat was pushed under the front door of community radio station Radio Victoria despite supposed 24-hour police security. The authors claim to be an “extermination group” and offer large sums of money to the radio if they “stop making trouble,” including to stop reporting on mining. If they don’t, the group says they will murder the radio’s three “loudest mouths,” Elvis Zavala, Pablo Ayala, and Manuel Navarrete.

On January 23, Mesa member and activist from MUFRAS-32 Hector Berríos received phone calls to his home and his cell phone from an unidentified person who claimed to have been hired to kill Hector or a member of his family.

This month, employees of CEICOM, a member organization of the Mesa, have been victims of two robberies in which a vehicle and important organizational documents were stolen. In 2010, while traveling to regional anti-mining conferences, CEICOM employees were robbed on one occasion and kidnapped, robbed and left tied up on a separate occasion in Guatemala.

Two young people in Cabañas who were connected to the June 2009 trial for the murder of Marcelo Rivera have been killed. Darwin Serrano, who participated in the murder but was released from prison because he was a minor, was attacked and killed on December 20. Gerardo Abrego León, who testified in the trial that convicted and sentenced to prison the material authors of Marcelo Rivera’s murder, was killed on January 2.

Activist groups have started a campaign to urge Salvadoran authorities to get to the bottom of this new round of violence.

19 years after peace accords

Salvadoran blogger Omar Nieto, who writes at El Salvador's longest-running blog Hunnapuh, has begun writing some of his posts for translation into English at Global Voices.

Omar recently wrote about Salvadorans' views of 19 years since signing of the peace agreements:

Sunday the 16th of January marked another year of peace for the country of El Salvador. It has been 19 years since the signing of a peace agreement in Chapultepec, Mexico, which brought an end to a bloody civil war that had been going on since 1981. With the commemoration of the event came discussion. Political, economical and social commentators as well as bloggers have had something to say on the matter....

The current Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador, José Luis Escobar Alas, stated that although the ceasefire was a “blessing from God,” Salvadorans had still not found peace, but it was not too late to achieve it.

Lamentablemente no tenemos todavía una paz estable, firme, duradera, bien afincada, pero enhorabuena, estamos en un buen momento para ir hacia allá.

Unfortunately we still do not have what we can call a stable, long-lasting peace, but there is reason to celebrate, as now we have a good opportunity to try for it.

Victor, a psychologist and well-know young blogger, comments in his blog Alta hora de la noche that the people of El Salvador do not have a collective awareness of what peace means, as they have never experienced it. He states that the very concept of peace is stained with blood. It seems, he adds, that egotistical behaviour is the “natural state” of Salvadorans who, thanks to a social and cultural system that favours the strong and the powerful, consider the agreement to be a sign of weakness. In his opinion, building a culture of peace, especially among adults, appears to be an impossible task. But it is a task worth doing, he states, each one, fighting the battle, from their own trench.

Read more views of the post-war period here.

News updates

Here are some updates to previous posts in this blog:


Environmentalists robbed again.    Members of CEICOM, which has taken an active role against mining activities in El Salvador have been robbed again as they were on their way to an environmental action.   As in two previous robberies, the activists and journalists who accompanied them were robbed of laptop computers, video equipment and more.  They have issued a renewed call for investigation.

Schools open without teacher strike.   Despite talk of a teacher strike, public schools opened on schedule throughout El Salvador today.

World union leaders renew call for Soto murder investigation.  One of the first stories covered in depth on this blog was the 2004 murder of Gilberto Soto.   Soto was a prominent figure involved in organizing port drivers in the United States. He was visiting El Salvador on behalf of the Teamsters to meet with Central American trade union leaders and port drivers when he was shot and killed. The case was reopened in 2009 by Mauricio Funes.  Eighteen months later, no progress appears to have been made, prompting the International Transport Workers Federation issued statements calling on "Attorney General Romeo Barahona to appoint an official who is willing and able to effectively investigate the murder of Jose Gilberto Soto, as well as other killings by death squads.”

Court system strike.   Unions in El Salvador's court system continued to strike, but police dislodged them from the offices of the forensic medical examiner over the weekend, where cadavers had been stacking up without autopsies.   The strikers seem to have little backing in the country, and the FMLN came out publicly opposed to the strike.

UNHCR on kidnappings of migrants.   The United Nations Commission on Human Rights issued a statement expressing concern and calling for a vigorous search to find migrants from El Salvador and other parts of Central America kidnapped off a train in southern Mexico.   Between 40 and 50 migrants were kidnapped when a freight train they were riding was stopped by armed persons believed to be part of Mexican drug gangs.

Court system employees on strike, teachers next

For five days now, union employees of El Salvador's court system have been on strike.   As a consequence, more than a thousand court hearings have been cancelled, bodies have gone unidentified in the forensic medicine office, and more than 87 prisoners have been released for failure to have an initial hearing within 72 hours of being arrested..  

The unions are demanding raises of between 100 and 150 dollars per month for their members, but court officials state there is no available money to grant the raises.  Court officials have also been blasting union leaders who officials say receive a salary but do not perform any work. La Prensa Grafica is reporting that union leaders receive multiple fringe benefits and also manage to get many relatives placed on the court system payroll as well.

The workers have called on religious leaders and the country's human rights ombudsman to act as mediators.  Oscar Luna, the PDDH, agreed to act as a mediator on Friday.   Meanwhile police sources told El Faro that they have postponed arresting criminals so that the criminals would not be freed because of the lack of a hearing in 72 hours.  

Meanwhile, the next sector of government workers planning to go on strike are the teachers, who plan to strike on Monday, January 24, the start of the new school year.

Organized drug crime in Central America

The Economist magazine has published an article today about the growing threat to Central America from the organized drug trade. Here's an excerpt:

“Central America is entering an extraordinarily critical phase” in which its peace and security are threatened by “the onslaught of the drug-trafficking organisations”, an official from the International Narcotics Control Board, a United Nations agency, warned this month.

Much of the blame lies with the arrival of the Mexican mafias, mainly the Zetas and the Sinaloa “cartel”. The assassination of Honduras’s top anti-drugs official in 2009 seems to have been a Sinaloa hit. Zeta training-camps and recruitment banners have sprung up in Guatemala. The Mexican mobs are also contracting out their work, taking advantage of Central America’s competitive narco-labour market. They recruit trained hitmen from the pool of soldiers laid off by several countries’ armies, slashed since the end of the civil wars 20 years ago. Guatemala has cut its army’s nominal strength by two-thirds since 1996. Now former members of its notorious Kaibiles special forces are said to have close links with the Zetas, themselves a former Mexican special-forces unit.

Read the rest here.

Danger on the bus

A news article in the Latin American Herald Tribune this week caught my attention. It described a bus accident in El Salvador caused by a bus driver on his cell phone:

At least 18 people were injured when an inter-city bus flipped over on a highway in El Salvador when the driver became distracted, the highway patrol said.

The accident occurred Saturday on the highway that links San Salvador and the eastern city of Usulutan.

Passengers said in statements to investigators that the driver lost control of the bus while talking on his cell phone, a highway patrol spokesman said.

Tragically, this accident was far from an isolated incident. El Salvador's roads and highways can be deadly:

SAN SALVADOR – A total of 1,107 people lost their lives in traffic accidents in El Salvador during 2010, according to figures compiled by the police, who reported 19,000 road accidents in total, an 11 percent increase compared with 2009, the Diario de Hoy newspaper reported Sunday.

Buses were involved in 11 percent of the accidents in which about 900 people were injured, the deputy director of traffic for the National Civilian Police, or PNC, Cesar Flores Murillo, told the newspaper.

In 2010, police imposed more than 2,000 fines on public transport drivers for, among other things, driving with very loud music blaring, driving without the proper license and ignoring warning signs, Flores said.

Riding the bus in El Salvador is cheap, but too often it's not safe.

Migration and deportation

Migration, from El Salvador to the US, will continue to be a major issue for both countries in 2011 as in past years. Salvadorans continue to enter the US, legally and illegally, seeking opportunity or the chance to be reunited with family members who had gone before. To understand some of the statistics surrounding this human stream, a good source is the recently published study of Central American Immigrants in the United States. The study is the product of the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute and provides a comprehensive look at the who, what and where of Central Americans now living in the US. Among many other facts, the study points out that persons born in El Salvador are now the 6th largest group of foreign born migrants living in the US. (The top 5 are Mexico, Philippines, India, China and Vietnam).

The increased level of deportations under current enforcement of US immigration policy resulted in continued record numbers of returns in 2010. There were more than 18,700 Salvadorans deported from the US during 2010. And as 2011 started, the first flight of deportees arrived in El Salvador on January 3 with another load of 106 Salvadorans. There are an average of 4 to 5 flights a week arriving in El Salvador, completely filled with deportees.

Study emphasizes need to address impacts of climate change

An item posted at Hispanically Speaking News describes how global climate change will compound the precarious state of El Salvador's water resources:

According to recent studies like the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), El Salvador will be the most water-stressed country in Central America in the future.
Population growth and climate change in the Central America region are driving this dire prediction. Water demand is expected to grow by 300 percent by 2050 in the region. To compound the problem the availability of renewable water could fall from current levels by 63 percent.

The study “The Economics of Climate Change in Central America: 2010” shows that El Salvador will be most negatively effected followed by Honduras and Nicaragua. El Salvador is also the most deforested country in Latin America.

The Central America region contributes a small part of the world’s green house gases emission, the leading cause of climate change, but is the most vulnerable to its negative effects.

The study by the ECLAC cited in the article is available for download here. The study is technical and full of facts and figures. But it sounds an alarm -- Central America is at risk from global climate change and must take steps without delay to mitigate the foreseeable future impacts:

Central American societies need to become more audacious managers of their water resources, securing their sustainable and efficient use for the benefit of the population and production. Protecting food security in the face of climate change, especially access to basic grains and making the transition toward more sustainable agriculture is a major and necessary challenge in order to protect the poorest members of the population, whether as small scale producers or urban consumers. The protection of natural ecosystems and their biodiversity, including forests, mountain and river systems, and coastal-marine zones, including coral reefs and mangroves, is vital to maintain the multiple services that these provide human and other living beings. The active development of appropriate technologies is essential for adaptation to climate change and the transition to low-carbon economies; both in terms of access to modern technologies and the recovery of traditional and local knowledge and technologies, especially those of indigenous peoples and small scale agriculturalist communities.

Tenth anniversary of the first 2001 earthquake

Today is the tenth anniversary of the first of two devastating earthquakes which hit El Salvador in 2001.  That quake registered 7.6 on the Richter scale.  Exactly one month later, on February 13, another earthquake would cause more damage.   Between those two, the damage was enormous:

• 1,259 deaths, 9,000 injuries and 1.6 million homeless victims in a country with a population of approximately six million.
  
• 150,000 homes were destroyed; 185,000 were damaged.
  
• Highways and roads were heavily damaged ).
  
• Eight hospitals and 113 of 361 health facilities were severely damaged representing 55 percent of the country’s capacity to deliver health services.
  
• Nearly 35 percent of all schools were affected (1,681 out of 4,820).

This BBC story from January 13, 2001 describes the aftermath of that first earthquake ten years ago.   Worst hit was the neighborhood of Las Colinas, close to San Salvador, where a hillside gave way, burying the homes below it and killing more than 585.

Las Colinas following quake

Working to rescue the survivors of the quake were the dedicated volunteers of Comandos de Salvamento.  You can read the reflections of some of those volunteers on this tenth anniversary here.   There is also a photogallery of the rescue work here.

Despite the passage of ten years, efforts to prevent the possibility of a recurrence of such a disaster are incomplete and partial.  The tragedy was not just the earthquake, but an ineffective government response.  Efforts to mitigate risk in many areas of El Salvador are essential -- last year there were more than 2300 seismic events in El Salvador, and more than 100 were strong enough to be felt by those who live there.

Consider as well the images from this photogallery at El Faro, describing a group of buildings seriously damaged in the 1986 earthquake.   The buildings should have been demolished long ago, but now more than 80 families live among the precarious ruins.  

For more information and images on the 2001 earthquakes, you can visit a multimedia special section of La Prensa Grafica.

Ten years of greenbacks in El Salvador

In January 2001, El Salvador began using the US dollar as its official currency. The former national currency, the Colón, was gradually replaced with the US dollar as the money of the land. The administration of president Francisco Flores promoted the change to the greenback as a way to keep interest rates low, to control inflation, and to encourage foreign investment.

It would be fair to say that the move to the dollar has never been popular among the ordinary people of El Salvador. The symbolism of giving up a country's national currency was obvious. And many felt that stores used the change as a pretext to increase prices and cheat the little person.

You can read several reviews which have been written about the impact of dollarization on El Salvador. The evidence is decidedly mixed. For example, a 2003 report from Latin America finance experts at a large US law firm reported generally favorable results. Business Week pointed out in 2005 that El Salvador had now ceded control to, and exposed itself to the impacts of, the policies of the US Federal Reserve Bank. A 2007 article in LA Times described the mixed results of dollarization.

An article titled The Socioeconomic Implications of Dollarization in El Salvador, published in Latin American Politics and Society, Fall 2004, had this to say:

From a political standpoint the policy appears to be reflection of El Salvador's polarized political and socioeconomic system, the power of the financial sector of the ARENA party, and the very limited influence of the opposition represented by the FMLN.

Dollarization means lack of control over monetary policy, which, in turn, means that when the government has a budget deficit, it has no choice but to cut spending. It no longer can use its control over the exchange rate to promote exports. In times of crisis, monetary policy cannot be used as a shock absorber. If remittances decline and a liquidity crisis follows, the government will not be able to bail out banks or insert currency into the economy. The dollars removed from the national reserve and put into circulation, furthermore, cost $330 million, and the government will continue to lose money in the future because of lost interest on that reserve.

Dollarization may contribute to small increases in economic growth through lowered interest rates. The proponents of the neoliberal model promise that economic growth will eventually raise the living standards of all the people. As shown in this paper, however, dollarization in El Salvador has not yet increased economic growth.

For the poor, the policy has uniquely negative effects, including inflation from rounding up prices, as well as a sense of confusion and vulnerability. To the extent that the poor have no access to formal loans, they have not yet benefited from the decline in interest rates, the most positive effect of the policy. The financial elite, on the other hand, does benefit from the lower interest rates and from the elimination or reduction of transaction costs.

While it is clear that the adoption of the dollar has produced a negative effect on the poor, there is one ray of hope in the medium and long term. If followed by gains in productivity, dollarization should attract foreign investment and thereby generate jobs and increased earnings. It will be essential then for the Salvadoran government to pursue policies geared to improving productivity, especially by investing in education and job training.

It will also be important for the government to pursue policies geared to expanding access to credit in order to expand the positive effects of the policy to the lower-income groups. Ideally, the government should guide at least a part of the new foreign investment into job producing activities and away from strategic alliances with the Salvadoran financial sector. If capital goes only to the financial sector and is used mainly for speculative purposes, the policy will not only fail to generate any positive effects on the poor; it will reinforce the existing distribution of income and power.

In an opinion poll in late 2008, 30.7% of respondents said dollarization was the prinicipal reason that the cost of living was increasing in El Salvador.

Still, we are unlikely to see a change from the use of the dollar in the near future. President Mauricio Funes has indicated that El Salvador will not "de-dollarize" during his administration. There seems to be a grudging consensus among those in power that changing currencies again would just cause more damage than it's worth.

Top El Salvador stories of 2010

My annual roundup of the top stories of the past year.


Record rains cause floods and damage crops.  Rains from tropical storms Agatha, Alex and Matthew inundated many parts of El Salvador during the course of the year.   Most of the country's bean crop was lost, causing the price of beans to soar.   Many corn fields were also impacted.  A tragic accident put a human face on the food crisis, when a father accidentally poisoned his family as their hunger led them to eat insecticide-treated seed corn.
  
Bus burning in Mejicanos.   All of El Salvador was shocked on June 20, 2010 as the country's violence took a horrifying turn. In Mejicanos, a suburb of San Salvador, gang members shot at a micro-bus of Route 47, then doused it with gasoline and set it on fire. Sixteen people were burned to death in the bus.   The massacre embodied the worst fears of Salvadorans stemming from one of the highest murder rates in the world.

Transit system shutdown.   For two days in September, the majority of buses in El Salvador did not operate.  Threats and rumors of threats by gangs led bus operators to keep their units off the streets.   The transit system is a prime target of criminal extortion and violence in the country.   A statement attributed to the gangs asserted that the shutdown of the bus system was a protest against a tough new anti-gang law passed by El Salvador's National Assembly.

Gold mining disputes in arbitration.   In 2010, the battle over gold mining in El Salvador shifted to international arbitration hearings in Washington, D.C.  Two gold mining companies, Pacific Rim and Commerce Group, have filed separate arbitrations under DR-CAFTA.  They seek millions of dollars in damages because they have not been allowed to mine gold in the country.   The government of El Salvador filed motions to dismiss both cases.  Hearings were held on those motions during 2010.   Pacific Rim survived the motion to dismiss, and the Commerce Group could get a decision as early as this week.

Tamaulipas massacre highlights risks.  Seventy-two migrant workers from Central America, including many Salvadorans, were massacred by Mexican drug gangs in Tamaulipas, Mexico.   The massacre brought international attention to the violence perpetrated against migrants trying to make their way through Mexico to the lure of jubs in the US. It was reported that more than 10,000 migrants were kidnapped in Mexico just in a six month period in 2009.   As 2010 closed, a kidnapping of another 50 migrants from El Salvador and elsewhere was reported.

30th anniversaries.   1980 was a tragic year in Salvadoran history when the country spiraled downward into civil war between leftist guerrillas and a government protecting the privileges of a wealthy few.  In the thirtieth anniversary year of 2010, Salvadorans commemorated the assassination of Oscar Romero, the murders of leaders of the FDR, and the rape and murder of the four US churchwomen.   Remembering their martyrdom gave remembrance as well to the 75,000 civilian victims of that war.  In January, president Mauricio Funes apologized on behalf of the Salvadoran government to victims of human rights violations during the civil war.

Funes goes to Cuba and Washington.   President Mauricio Funes continued to show that his foreign policy will be marked by pragmatism and not by alliance to any political block in the western hemisphere.   Funes traveled to Washington where, like Salvadoran leaders before him, he asked for Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to be extended.   Funes also became the first Salvadoran leader since the country broke off diplomatic ties with Cuba in 1951 to travel to that island country .


Funes charts course independent of FMLN.  There was grumbling by the FMLN throughout 2010 as Mauricio Funes didn't follow the party line.  According to FMLN party official Medardo González, "Funes is implementing a plan that is not the plan of the FMLN. The FMLN presented a program, but the plan that the President is implementing has clear differences with the draft presented by the FMLN."  But it did not impact Funes' poll numbers -- the president continues to enjoy very high approval ratings half-way through his second year.

Possible election changes.    The proposals won't have an impact until 2012, but El Salvador's Supreme Electoral Tribunal moved forward with adopting residential voting in El Salvador.  Voters will finally get polling places close to where they live.  The Supreme Court shook the political landscape when it issued a ruling that would allow voters to vote for individual candidates rather than for political parties.

El Salvador's homicide rate improved slightly in 2010

The number of murders committed in El Salvador declined 9.1% in 2010 from its peak level in 2009. In 2010 there were 3985 violent deaths, 397 fewer than the total of 4382 in 2009. Translated differently, there was an average of 11 murders per day in El Salvador during 2010.

This reduction in the murder rate resulted in Honduras pulling into a statistical tie for the highest murder rate in Latin America. The murder rate in Honduras is 72.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, while the rate in El Salvador is 71. (Both rates are significantly higher than the homicide rates in Iraq and Afghanistan, 18 and 14 per 100,000 respectively). The World Health Organization says any rate above 10 is an epidemic.

According to statistics from LPG, 3420 murder victims were men and 562 women. Guns were overwhelmingly used in the commission of murders: 3923 of the 3985 homicides were the result of a gunshot.

One of the targets in El Salvador continues to be the transportation sector, where murder is the consequence for those who do not comply with extortion demands. According to statistics from ContraPunto, 21 buses were burned last year, $14 million extorted, and 137 people in the transport industry murdered.

So the level of homicides in 2010 is not good news -- but it's not worse news than the year before.

Economy predicted to improve in 2011

Government officials are predicting economic growth for 2011 in El Salvador. This follows a year of little growth in 2010 and economic contraction during 2008 and 2009 in the depths of the global recession. From a report on the Inside Costa Rica website:

Treasury Minister of El Salvador Carlos Caceres is said to be confident of a 2.5 percent economic growth in the country next year.

The Gross Domestic Product [growth rate] will not reach the one percent forecast for this year, and fluctuated from 0.7 to 0.8 percent after having fallen into negative figures (-3.3 percent) in 2009.

In remarks to a TV program, he cited factors for recovery in 2011, including a more stable situation in the United States, on the economy of which El Salvador is very dependent. He also referred to an increase in remittances from Salvadorians living abroad, estimated at about 18 percent of the GDP, and a more favourable situation in agriculture, with high coffee sales, as well as high sugar prices at international market.

Public investment[stimulus], estimated at USD $1.20 billion, is also expected to be another factor for growth in 2012.

President Funes described the elements of the $1.2 billion in public spending:

Funes said that the government will spend over 1.2 billion dollars, with which he hopes to encourage, too, the private sector.

It is a golden opportunity to provide families in El Salvador with work, service, employment and income, Funes said in one of his recent speeches.

The plan could shore up the construction industry that generates many jobs. It has been three years in a row in recession with negative numbers.

Government's social programs are also aimed at helping medium, small and micro enterprises to foster business and thus create jobs.

More than six thousand of these entrepreneurs make uniforms, shoes and school supplies for the Ministry of Education that distributes them, free of charge since last year, to more than 1.3 million students.

The government estimates that comprehensive health reform, underway since last year for universal health care to previously excluded sectors, can generate about 14,000 jobs.

In addition, there'll be investment in infrastructure, productive partnerships with private capital, increased wages and pensions to the public sector that besides improving the living conditions of public employees, they will increase domestic consumption.