Spanish court indicts 20 Salvadoran military officers for murder of Jesuits

The Spanish court which has been receiving evidence about the 1989 murders of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter, issued an indictment today for 20 former officers in the Salvadoran military. The court in Spain is acting under a doctrine of "universal jurisdiction" in which some crimes against humanity are so serious that they can be prosecuted anywhere. The case against senior officals, including two ministers of defense, had never been brought in El Salvador because of the 1993 amnesty law.

CNN describes the ruling:

In an indictment issued Monday, Judge Eloy Velasco Nunez accused the officials -- including El Salvador's former defense minister -- of murder, terrorism and crimes against humanity. He said a trial in El Salvador was flawed and failed to bring the perpetrators to justice.

"That judicial process was a defective and widely criticized process that ended with two forced convictions and acquittals even of confessed killers," Velasco wrote.

Two military officers were convicted of murder in 1991, but were pardoned in 1993 under an amnesty law approved by El Salvador's National Assembly.

You can read (in Spanish), the judge's ruling at this link.  While most of the information in the indictment is already public knowledge, the ruling shows the motivations of a military command structure determined to subvert peace negotiations.  The military command viewed Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuria, the rector of the University of Central America, and the other Jesuits as the intellectual authors of the FMLN tactics in pushing peace negotiations.  A peace agreement would likely dismantle the sources of the military's power in the country, and they were determined to prevent that from happening.

Although an indictment has been issued, don't expect to see the Salvadoran colonels and generals appearing in custody in Spain anytime soon explains the LA Times:

The indictment is largely symbolic since the officers are protected from prosecution in El Salvador. But rights activists hailed the ruling as important.

"It is a powerful and symbolic message against impunity and sends a clear message to the military that were involved in human rights abuses and crimes against humanity," said Abraham Abrego, deputy director of the Foundation for the Application and Study of Law, an independent human-rights organization.

"It restricts the possibility of these military officers fleeing to other countries, because if they try to escape, other countries that have judicial cooperation with Spain can arrest and send them to a tribunal in Spain,” Abrego said.

Three worthwhile articles on crime in El Salvador

Three recent articles offer insights into different aspects of the problem of violent crime in El Salvador. The first is a reflection written by the Rev. Brian Rude, titled Current Realities in Salvadoran Gang Cultures. Rude is a Lutheran pastor from Canada who has spent many years working with gang members and persons incarcerated in El Salvador's hellish prisons. His reflection on the Crispaz website, makes the point that we must get past the demonization of gang members and develop understanding of their lives and situations:

One could approach the current reality from a statistical perspective, though statistics are hard to come by, distressingly diverse, and often unreliable. How many gang members are there? The number of those in prison -- about 8,000, 1/3 of the total number of inmates in El Salvadoran prisons -- is perhaps the most reliable indicator here. More than double, or even triple, that number could be outside the prison walls. Harsher laws have led to greater mobility and flexibility on their part. They have largely abandoned their former passion for defending their "barrio" or neighborhoods. Their territory might now well be their clientele, rather than any particular geographical space.

A variant question might better be posed: how many potential gang members are living in Salvadoran barrios? What factors might affect whether or not young Salvadorans follow in the footsteps of their older siblings, their parents, their neighbours, who often serve as their models, even their heroes? As with those who have gone before, these potential recruits have few other options or opportunities to pursue. The reality which surrounds them easily draws them in.

One of the many troubling aspects of crime in El Salvador is the level of violence against women.  The scope of this problem is described in an article by Hannah Stone titled El Salvador Sees Epidemic of Violence Against Women which appeared on the website Insight:Organized Crime in the Americas.  She writes:

El Salvador has one of the highest murder rates in the world, with almost 70 per 100,000 people. This is mostly due to soaring gang violence, with the country an increasingly important transit location for drugs being trafficked into the U.S., and the local “maras” or gangs fighting over the business. Sexualized killings of women make up a relatively minor proportion of the many violent deaths -- of some 4,000 murders the police registered in 2010, 580 were identified as femicides.

What draws attention to the killings of women, and girls, is their brutality. The deputy head of the police force told the press recently that, while the victims of gang violence are as much men as women, the level of violence used against the women is higher. He said that the number of these attacks is rising “alarmingly.”

The reasons behind these killings are murky. El Salvador’s femicides have coincided with the growth of organized crime in recent years, but have outstripped even the booming murder rate. The country has seen a five-fold increase in femicides over the last decade, according to ORMUSA, while its murder rate has roughly doubled in the same period.

Most of the murders, of women or men, in El Salvador are commited with guns.   The Voices from El Salvador blog examines the easy accessibility of powerful weapons in the country in a post titled Gun Trafficking in El Salvador- Hard to Track, Harder to Stop.  As described in this post, there is a thriving black market in arms in the country, as well as several other channels by which guns end up in the hands of criminals:

El Salvador has an extensive and easily accessible black market where buyers can find firearms and explosives of all shapes, sizes and origins, with little interference from law enforcement. The black market is comprised of individual dealers who operate out of their homes, cars, or even the backrooms of local businesses. Most often, black market weapons come from international sources in the US or Europe and are trafficked through Mexico down to El Salvador, or they are stolen out of Salvadoran military or police arsenals. 

One of the biggest buyers of illegal weapons is El Salvador’s numerous security firms that protect private and government interests. Though they are legal entities, security firms prefer to purchase arms off the black market to avoid government scrutiny. Security companies have thrived over the years, making millions from Salvadorans who increasingly live in fear of being robbed or killed by the country’s notorious street gangs. These security firms also serve as a large source of weapons for thieves. In the past two years alone, more than 1,700 weapons have been reported missing by private security companies.

Follow the links to read the full text of these articles to gain a fuller understanding of a few of the dimensions of the violent crime plaguing El Salvador.

The El Salvador WikiLeaks cables

WikiLeaks has provided some 942 US diplomatic cables related to El Salvador to the online periodical El Faro. The cables cover the time period from 2003 through 2008 under the Bush administration in Washington and the Flores and Saca administrations in El Salvador. El Faro has now started to make those cables available online on its website.

The leaked cables provide an inside look at the US-El Salvador relationship, and highlight a US administration which believed it had found a very close ally in the ARENA led governments of those years.

I'll highlight some of the individual cables in future posts. The WikiLeaks project represents yet another coup for the independent journalists at El Faro.

Other cables from the US Embassy in El Salvador dated in 2009 and 2010 were released several months ago.

FMLN chooses candidate for 2012 San Salvador mayoral race

The FMLN has confirmed that Jorge Schafik Handal will run as the left wing party's candidate for mayor of San Salvador in the 2012 elections.  He is the son of Schafik Handal, an FMLN guerrilla leader during the country's civil war and unsuccessful candidate for president of El Salvador in 2004.

Jorge Schafik Handal is currently a deputy in the National Assembly from Usulutan.  He will be running against the current mayor of San Salvador, Norman Quijano from ARENA, who won his first term as mayor in 2009.

Aeroman aircraft maintenance in El Salvador

I have written previously about the growth of aircraft maintenance business at Aeroman in El Salvador. US airlines such as JetBlue, US Airways, Southwest, and others outsource with Aeroman to provide heavy maintenance on jetliners in their fleets.  The Aeroman facility at El Salvador's international airport provides hundreds of good-paying (by El Salvador standards) jobs.

A week ago, KIRO-TV in Seattle, did an "investigative" report on Aeroman, titling it Third-World Mechanics Paid $2 Per Hour For Boeing, Airbus Jet Repairs.   (A year and a half ago there was a similar story on National Public Radio).

From the KIRO story:

At the edge of an airport property just outside the city of San Salvador sits four buildings tucked away from public view. The massive bays are owned by a passenger jet repair company called Aeroman. Every time KIRO Team 7 Investigators tried to get a little closer look, someone with a gun or a badge or both told us “no permiso.”

We asked for a tour in advance of our arrival, but when we showed up at the main repair facility with a camera, Aeroman officials told us to leave. Team 7 Investigators didn't go to El Salvador to be shooed away. Using surveillance, we determined that the only place we could see inside the repair operation was from the main runway of El Salvador's International Airport at Comalapa. No problem. 

We paid a private, small aircraft pilot to take off at a different airport and fly us to Aeroman's front door. By slowly taxiing past the facility several times, we could watch three Southwest Airlines, Boeing-made 737's being torn apart for repairs. We also videotaped a US Airways jet with its engine opened up on this day, then undergoing more serious repairs inside the hangar a few days later. A Jet Blue Airbus-made passenger plane was in the hangar as well.

Salvadorian officials didn’t appreciate our presence or questions about Aeroman. It appeared to us that the company, the government, the military, and the Port Authority worked in tandem to prevent unfiltered information from reaching the public.

The reporting in the story is actually pretty shoddy. There are a few anecdotes from two workers in the plant who talk about being pressured to work too fast. The report focuses on the lower pay of mechanics at Aeroman compared with those in the US, and suggests that maintenance at Aeroman should not be trusted because El Salvador is a "third world country."  (The reporters don't mention that Aeroman is owned by Aveos Group, a Canadian company).

US unions have long campaigned against outsourcing of aircraft maintenance jobs to other countries. The Teamsters union has a major campaign going on against aircraft maintenance outsourcing in an attempt to keep US-based airlines from having maintenance done in El Salvador and elsewhere. The Transport Workers Union immediately pointed to the KIRO-TV report as a reason why maintenance work should not be outsourced.

The unions have been bolstered by a report by the Office of Inspector General of the US Department of Transportation which criticizes the FAA's oversight of maintenance stations outside the US. While the OIG report does a thorough job of critiquing the FAA for lax oversight, the report does not actually establish that outsourcing decreases safety in general, or that outsourcing to El Salvador in particular has any safety risks for US airlines. But clearly the fact that repair stations are inspected by the FAA is not, in itself, a guarantee that the stations actually follow high quality practices.  The Air Transport Association, the trade association of the airline industry does offer statistics which it claims contradict the idea that outsourcing maintenance has a negative impact on safety.

The unexamined assumption of the KIRO-TV story, however, is its assumption that aircraft maintenance performed in the US by higher paid workers is of higher quality. (Perhaps this is an assumption which relates to KIRO-TV being located in Seattle, where Boeing has significant operations and there are thousands of aircraft mechanics in the area). A 2010 USA Today study, however, details how maintenance mistakes have impacted thousands of US flights. The report cites numerous instances of problems at US-based maintenance operations, including both facilities owned by the airlines and facilities which are contracted.

Aeroman describes the quality achieved by its operations on the Aeroman website:

Our business is not limited to maintenance; our main business goal is to offer customers the confidence and assurance that each time one of their aircrafts leaves our facilities it has been worked on with the most rigorous safety guidelines. Aeroman is certified by the FAA and many other Regulatory entities around the world. For nearly 30 years safety has been Aeroman’s number one priority; adhering to rules, regulations and policies established by these entities, always abiding to guidelines in the work performed.

To guarantee these safety standards, all employees undergo hours of constant rigorous training processes, which allow them to develop the technical abilities necessary to assure excellence in the services offered. In recognition to the commitment and effort to comply with the highest safety standards, we have received the FAA’s Corporate Diamond Certificate of Excellence, one of the most important acknowledgments in the industry.

The Aeroman site provides copies of many international certifications on the website, including ISO 9001 and European Union air safety authority.

Aeroman is a success story for El Salvador.   There are plenty of sweat shops, maquilas, and other places in El Salvador where workers are exploited, underpaid, and in unsafe working conditions.   Those operations compete wrongly and unfairly.  Aeroman is not one of them.  The sensationalistic journalism exemplified by the KIRO-TV report reflects a simple prejudice against business and workers south of the US border.

Desperate lives packed into a tractor trailer

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The ghostly image above is an X-ray image taken by Mexican authorities who discovered 513 migrants stuffed into two tractor trailer trucks in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas last Tuesday.   In the X-ray, you can see how some migrants were standing, holding on to ropes so others could fill the floors.  More than 400 of the migrants were from Guatemala.  Of the others, 47 were from El Salvador.

The migrants said they paid $7000 each for the trip.  Four of the human smugglers were captured.

This case provides another example of the desperation pushing Central American migrants out of their countries towards the north.    Despite the well-publicized dangers of the journey, hundreds and thousands try to travel illegally through Mexico and into the US.   A report in La Prensa Grafica states that 500,000 undocumented Central American migrants pass through the Mexican state of Chiapas each year.

The Texis Drug Cartel in El Salvador

The online periodical El Faro has published a major exposé on a drug-trafficking organization in El Salvador known as the Texis Cartel. These narco-traffickers control a route which transports drugs from the town of San Fernando on the northern border with Honduras in Chalatenango to the border with Guatemala in Santa Ana Department. This route basically cuts across the northwest corner of El Salvador.

The website Insight spotlighted the El Faro reporting this week:

With a network of collaborators that allegedly includes policemen, soldiers, judges and federal congressmen, El Faro stated that the Texis Cartel had turned itself into one of the key players for anyone seeking to smuggle drugs through this small Central American nation. Efforts to build a criminal case against the group have gone nowhere. This is despite the government’s longstanding awareness of the gang's existence, according to reports seen by El Faro, and the fact that the group’s founders allegedly include high-profile public figures.

El Faro reveals that the cartel includes well-known business, political and other figures in that part of the country. The head of the cartel, known as "Chepe Diablo," is José Adán Salazar Umaña. Salazar is president of major league soccer in El Salvador, a prominent hotel operator and rancher, and a narco-trafficker. El Faro says that the police, attorney general and army have long known about Salazar's role.

The cartel also includes the mayors of Metapan and Texistepeque and a deputy in the National Assembly.

Here is a translation of a few passages from the lengthy El Faro story provided by Insight:

The police, the army, and the justice department know Chepe Diablo. The intelligence reports obtained in this investigation clearly say that he is one of the bosses of the cartel that controls the route that begins in San Fernando. The route runs south until Dulce Nombre de Maria, where it turns toward the west, passes through Nueva Concepcion and arrives at the city of Metapan, in the upper left corner of the Salvadoran map, on the border with Guatemala. This path that drugs travel is the route that is currently on the verge of getting a promotion thanks to the opening of a new highway, the Longitudinal Highway of the North. The police that investigate Salazar and his group call the cartel’s area of operation the Northern Cocaine Route or the Little Pathway.
[...]
The drugs that pass through San Fernando mostly come from the Atlantic coasts of Honduras and arrive in Honduras from two primary places. By sea, the go-fast boats originating in Colombia cross the abandoned Nicaraguan Caribbean making brief stopovers until arriving at the Honduran border department Gracias a Dios. By air, the planes descend in the Honduran jungle department Olancho or in the border between both nations marked by the Rio Coco. The drugs are carried along routes cutting through the central Honduran region until arriving at Ocotepeque department, which borders the Salvadoran city San Fernando, in Chalatenango department.

San Fernando is the transfer point where the Hondurans hand over the shipment to the Salvadorans, in a journey directed by Colombians and Mexicans. A highway that moves millions of dollars in profits for its controllers disguised as businessmen, ranchers, mayors, police, gang members, coyotes, and congressmen. Each one plays a role: the police corrupted by drug traffickers watch over and transport the drugs, remove inspection checkpoints, warn of coming operations; the mayors give building permits, formalize business arrangements, are privileged informants, and, in one case, even the leader of the group; the gang members kill and traffic in local markets; the deputies give access to the high strata of power; and some judges and prosecutors take care to block any attempt to prosecute with the most precise [application of] bureaucratic force.

In light of the El Faro report, Salvadoran officials fell over themselves this week calling for an investigation into drug-trafficking in the northwest of the country. But they had no answers for why there had been no earlier prosecutions when El Faro's report showed that the police had long known about the Texis cartel.

The report is also a potential embarrassment for the United States Millennium Challenge Corporation program with El Salvador.   The major focus of the MCC has been economic development in the northern regions of El Salvador, centering on the construction of the Northern Longitudinal Highway.    That highway happens to follow the same route as the Texis Cartel's drug shipments, and the El Faro report talks about the drug traffickers' appreciation of having a speedier highway for their cargo.

Perhaps more serious is the report by El Faro that development loans from MCC funds have gone to cartel members and facilitated laundering of their drug money.  A $600,000 loan for agricultural development was disbursed to a family with known ties to narco-trafficking in the region.

This story is going to have repercussions for months to come.   Stay tuned.

O'Grady's back -- and still not right

Multiple people sent me copies this week of an editorial in the Wall Street Journal by Mary Anastasia O'Grady, titled El Salvador Quits the Market Model, and asked me for my thoughts. O'Grady's viewpoints can be summed up by this opening quote:

Mauricio Funes of the FMLN party, has been a disaster for the once-thriving Salvadoran economy.

This week's editorial is just part of a string of right-wing diatribes against El Salvador which O'Grady has published over the years.

But when you take a closer look at the article, you'll see that O'Grady is simply dishonest with her use of statistics. The first statistic she cites is from a recent United Nations' Economic Commission on Latin America and the Caribbean report which states that foreign direct investment increased 40% in the region in 2010 over 2009, but in El Salvador it fell 79%. The report does say that, but there is also an important footnote which notes that El Salvador reclassified how it calculates foreign direct investment at the end of 2009, so the 2009 and 2010 numbers are not directly comparable. I have studied the report and looked for other sources to explain what the real comparison between 2009 and 2010 is, bur I have not found it.

Another "statistic" O'Grady cites is that El Salvador fell 17 points on the 2010 World Index of Economic Freedom published by the conservative Heritage Foundation and the WSJ. Leaving aside whether this index is actually worth anything, O'Grady conveniently fails to mention that El Salvador is still rated higher on this index than every country in Latin America other than Chile.

O'Grady claims that El Salvador was a great economic engine between 1989 through 2008, but has fallen down with Mauricio Funes. Again, she fails to point out that until 1992, El Salvador was in the midst of a civil war. The economy took off in 1992 and later because there was a peace dividend, not because of a specific set of ARENA economic policies. O'Grady also points to the reduction in poverty during that same time period. It's true that poverty declined, but that decline was largely due to family remittances from Salvadorans abroad and not because El Salvador's economy was being so well guided by the policies of ARENA governments.

O'Grady wants to criticize Funes for economic performance since he took office, but disregards the fact that Funes took office during the midst of a huge global economic downturn which inevitably affected El Salvador like everyone else. She also criticizes Funes for spending more on social programs than the anemic spending of his predecessors.

And of course, O'Grady cannot help but mention yet again her view that the Pacific Rim gold mining company is being treated unfairly.

This is not to say that El Salvador's economy is doing well -- it's not.   The cost of living is increasing, unemployment remains intractably high, crime discourages investment and other economic activity, and remittances fell off substantially as the US economy went into recession.   My point is simply that O'Grady helps no one in understanding the issues facing El Salvador when she continues to distort her information. O'Grady is a right-wing ideologue with an agenda, plain and simple.

But at least she regularly gives me something to write about.

A step towards improving the lot of women

El Salvador's current government is focusing millions of development dollars on improving the situation of Salvadoran women. The program known as Ciudad Mujer is creating a series of regional centers which to address specific needs of poor women. An article in Hispanically Speaking News describes the program goals:

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) has approved a $20 million loan to help El Salvador finance the Ciudad Mujer (Women City) Program to be carried out by its Ministry of Social Inclusion to improve the lives of low-income women. The program seeks to offer essential services, such as health services with an emphasis on sexual and reproductive health, treatment and prevention of gender-based violence, vocational and business skills training, promotion of women´s rights, and childcare. The centers are to be strategically located in 12 areas across the country....

By delivering key services to women, the project addresses crucial development issues. Violence against women affects almost half the female population in El Salvador, and 82 women die in childbirth for every 100,000 live births. Salvadoran women, on average, earn only 57 percent of what men earn.

Hopefully this well-intentioned program will make a difference. Violence against women is a serious problem which the country is only starting to address. Discrimination against women in employment is common according to the UN. Much needs to be done.

Radio Victoria continues to receive threats

Amnesty International and many other human rights and solidarity organizations have reacted to a new round of threatening messages received by the staff at Radio Victoria in Cabañas. Radio Victoria has been prominent in reporting on the gold-mining conflict and other social issues in the region. From Amnesty International:

Authorities in El Salvador must take immediate action to protect journalists who fear for their lives after receiving a series of death threats, Amnesty International said today.  From 30 April to 4 May, staff members at Radio Victoria, a community radio station committed to social and human rights reporting in Cabañas region north-east of the capital San Salvador, told Amnesty International they received repeated death threats claiming to come from a “death squad.” 

“It’s unacceptable for El Salvador to stand by while members of the media receive threats intended to silence them,” said Guadalupe Marengo, Amnesty International's Americas Deputy Director.   “The Salvadoran authorities must immediately provide protection to the staff and launch an independent, thorough and impartial investigation into these repeated threats and bring those responsible to justice.” 

A letter delivered to Radio Victoria at early on the morning of 30 April threatened the lives of journalists Pablo Ayala and Manuel Navarte if they failed to stop broadcasting and leave the area within three days. The author of the letter claimed to have photographs and video of the two journalists.  On 2 May, Pablo Ayala and Marixela Ramos, a news producer at Radio Victoria, received several text messages threatening them.  Several hours after Radio Victoria staff held a press conference about the intimidation in San Salvador on 4 May, they received additional threatening text messages.

You can read about the work of Radio Victoria in this 2010 blog post from Voices from El Salvador. In August 2009, I wrote about threats and reported acts of sabotage against the radio station during a time period when the gold mining conflict was at its height. There is an online petition at Change.org which you can sign to show support for demands for an investigation of these threats against journalism in El Salvador.

Violence against LGBT individuals in El Salvador

The Denver publication Westword has a cover article this week which shines a light on violence against LGBT persons living in El Salvador. The story, titled Coming Out to America, tells the story of Kassandra, a transgender Salvadoran woman fled to the US, seeking asylum from the violence, prejudice and persecution she faced at home.   A 2010 report to the UN titled The Violation of the Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Persons in El Salvador provides an overview of the situation facing LGBT individuals in the country. The story of Kassandra puts a personal face on that situation.

The city v the street vendors ... again.

The weekend was filled with conflict in the historic city center of San Salvador. Mayor Norman Quijano, like mayors before him of other political parties, is trying to relocate the informal vendors whose stalls clog the sidewalks and streets in the center. The vendors don't want to go, and as in times before, the conflict resulted in clashes with fires, vandalism, rock-throwing and phalanxes of riot police. The video above from La Prensa Grafica shows some of the scene. The disturbances resulted in damage to both the National Theater and the National Palace in the city center.

An estimated 16,000 vendors sell their wares in the streets around the Metropolitan Cathedral and the central plazas. The mayor wants to relocate them to specific market areas, but El Faro reports this week that the mayor's plan only has spaces for about half of the vendors. In the same article, the mayor asserts that his efforts are not directed at the humble campesina woman selling some mangoes, but at the quasi-permanent structures of wood and steel built on public rights-of-way that are furnished with electricity, water and even air conditioning and don't pay taxes. The Catholic archbishop expressed agreement with the goal of reorganizing the city center, but questioned the strong arm tactics of the municipal police force as they evicted vendors.

Resurrected as a squash

From time to time, I have pointed to the blog of Tim Lohrentz who writes about the indigenous history of El Salvador.    Most recently, Tim writes about a death and resurrection story in Maya-Lenca culture -- the story of One Hunahpu who is killed and then resurrected as a calabash squash.  As he explains, it is a story with roots in history, agriculture and astronomy.  

Troops to stay in the streets

Salvadoran president Mauricio Funes announced today that Salvadoran troops will continue providing support in combating crime in the country for at least another twelve months. The announcement came as part of ceremonies marking the Day of the Salvadoran Soldier.

Although the visible presence of troops in the streets has been popular with Salvadorans weary of the country's ongoing crime wave, there is little evidence that the troops have had any significant impact on crimes of extortion and murder. Homicides in 2011 continue at the same rate as in 2010.

May 3 -- The Day of the Cross

Earlier this week, there were celebrations in El Salvador of the Day of the Cross.   It is a tradition which blends a celebration of the Christian cross with thankfulness for the start of the rainy season and the rains which will make the ground fertile once again.   Blogger Alisha, who lives in Berlin, El Salvador, has a great post this week describing the celebration in her community.  Here's an excerpt:

When we arrived in Alejandría we first visited Blanca and Cecilia’s houses. Their families had both put out crosses of their own and decorated them. It was fun to see when other people’s crosses looked like. Blanca’s family had two crosses, both with mangos and real and paper flowers. We also saw Cecilia’s neighbor’s cross. She said there weren’t a lot of decorations on it but I thought it was beautiful. I loved the bougainvillea and green mangos that adorned the cross. The cross as Cecilia’s house, which I was told is Idalia’s cross, was very ornate. It had a plate of mangos in front of it and was decorated with several flowers from the garden. I love the flowers that grow here in El Salvador. I took pictures of several flowers at their house.

Next we made it to Jesus’ house. His mother, Lola, lives there and Jesus lives there occasionally because he usually lives and works at the church here in Berlín. The inside of their home was filled with flower arrangements. I have to hand it to the Salvadorans: they know how to use flowers in every way imaginable and they use them for everything. I’ve never been to a celebration here that didn’t have flowers and today was no exception. They create the most exquisite displays I’ve ever seen.

Go to Alisha's blog to read the rest of her description and see photos of the crosses and flowers.

One general in court, one general dies

As previously reported, a deportation trial is being held in Florida, where the US government is seeking to deport General Eugenio Vides Casanova, former head of the Salvadoran National Guard and former Defense Minister.

The Center for Justice and Accountability, which has previously brought civil suits against General Vides on behalf of torture victims, has a summary of the first round of testimony which recently concluded. Many of the witnesses are the same ones who have testified in other US court proceedings about crimes against humanity during the civil war, including former Ambassador Robert White. One of the witnesses was Stanford University professor Terry Karl who testified:

In Professor Karl’s opinion, Vides' pattern of conduct—his promotion and protection of known human rights abusers, failure to inspect and close down torture chambers, obstruction of investigations, refusal to dismantle death squads, and personal visitation of prisoners undergoing torture—constituted active participation in torture.

The trial has paused and will resume on May 24.

As this trial goes on, another figure from the Salvadoran military leadership during the twelve year civil war has died. General Rene Emilio Ponce died this week. General Ponce was found by the UN Truth Commission to have ordered the 1989 killing of 6 Jesuit priests at the University of Central America. The Washington Post story about his death reports:

Unrepentant, apparently, to the end, Gen. Ponce always maintained that he and his 32,000-member army fulfilled their mission to stem “communist aggression.”

Although he rarely discussed the matter in public, Gen. Ponce told a Salvadoran interviewer in 2009 that he did not give the order to kill the Jesuits and that suggestions that he did so were part of a leftist conspiracy to besmirch his name.

“It is unjust, because I dedicated 30 years of my life to defend my country, and in the most difficult moments, I led the armed forces strategically to defend a system threatened by an internationally backed communist aggression,” he said.

“I regret nothing that I did in benefit of my nation . . . defending the institutionalism of the state and its constitutional system,” he added. “The Jesuits were victims of the circumstances.”

And still in El Salvador, no judicial proceeding has ever sought to bring to justice those in high command responsible for human rights abuses during the war. Benjamin Cuellar, head of the Human Rights Institute at the University of Central America, has a passionate plea at this link for the end of such impunity and for a focus on justice for the victims.

Supreme Court eliminates PCN and PDC

El Salvador's two oldest right wing political parties have lost their official standing following a ruling by the country's Supreme Court.   The Christian Democratic Party  (PDC for its initials in Spanish) and the National Conciliation Party (PCN) failed to receive then necessary 3% of votes in the 2004 presidential elections which would allow them to continue as recognized political parties.  However, in 2005, a law passed by the National Assembly  purported to waive the 3% requirement, and allowed the parties to continue to participate in elections.  In its ruling this week, the Supreme Court found the 2005 law to be invalid and in contravention of the requirements of the Salvadoran constitution. (There's a good overview of the court ruling in an article in El Faro at this link).

The PCN and PDC were founded in the early 1960's, and both parties elected presidents of the country in the 1970s and 1980s. More recently, they had been small minority parties in the legislature, usually casting their votes in alliance with the right-wing ARENA party. This voting bloc kept the National Assembly in control of conservative parties, and the PCN's Ciro Cruz Zepeda was president of the assembly. This voting control ended only recently when divisions in ARENA created the GANA party, and new alliances were formed leading to the election of a National Assembly president from the FMLN.

With elections of mayors and National Assembly deputies approaching in 2012, the PCN and PDC must re-register by gathering 50,000 signatures of support if they wish to participate.

The ruling leaves ARENA, the FMLN, GANA (the party formed by ARENA defectors) and Democratic Change (CD), as the registered parties for the 2012 elections.