El Salvador: Presidentialism

Greta and I roomed together at the guesthouse and had a chance to chat every evening, but we were usually too tired to talk over what we’d seen and heard. Although I spent everyday with Will, Pete and Richard, apart from the plane trip down with Will I didn’t carry on a whole conversation with any of them over the ten days of the trip. Tom and Margaret were strong personalities. When we weren’t at the meetings they arranged for us, they talked and we listened.

Tom, young as he was, had a Salvadoran wife and two daughters. He wasn’t just passing through. He knew a lot about conditions, especially out in the country, and he believed he knew why these conditions prevailed.  He was angry.  Why had all those campesinos fought and died during the war? So Tom and people like him could cart around visitors from the U.S. and Europe, hoping they’d donate to a few local projects? Twelve thousand children still died every year of the gastrointestinal results of having no potable water. The Salvadoran government wasn’t going to help, and the U.S. would help only as long as Salvadorans went along with privatization, structural adjustments, free trade. These changes hurt, he and many others were convinced, more than they helped. The rich were committed to one thing only—getting richer. People like us made some difference, but not nearly enough.

Margaret’s true gifts didn’t surface until she was among her friends in COO. In the city she mainly gave instructions. She began most sentences with “I suggest”: I suggest we order pupusas and horchata for lunch.  I suggest you ask the man from the health workers’ union about the firing of elected leaders by factory owners. She deferred to Tom when it came to politics, maybe because he argued with her when he thought she was wrong.  Anyway, politics weren’t her thing.  Her favorite Bible verse was Romans 8:28: “We know that all things work together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose.” 

“I’ve been bringing people down here for a long time,” Margaret said, “and as long as there are people who want to come, I’ll keep bringing them.”

Margaret was about faith. Tom was about politics. 

Here’s the big picture I was putting together as the trip progressed. The infamous “Fourteen Families,” who until the war had owned nearly all the land and planted it in cash crops like coffee, lost property in the land redistributions. Wealth had concentrated even further: now five or six families owned the banks, the insurance companies, importing, everything.  Farming wasn’t important anymore because the U.S. had plenty of food suppliers. What U.S. corporations wanted was cheap labor and large consumer markets. The FMLN had managed to elect members to some local positions, but national Salvadoran politics were “presidentialist.” And due to corrupt elections, presidents had for decades been exclusively right wing.  All those subsistence farmers in the campo would be better off, so went the free-trade argument, working at factories that foreign investors would build if conditions were right—that is, for example, if unions were kept out, one way or another.

That's all politics, isn't it?  Wasn't the Jesuit Miguel Ventura also all about politics? I was having trouble seeing where faith came into this.

On day number three we drove east and south, the temperature rising as steadily as the humidity, and stayed the night at a leadership center run by nuns. The next morning we drove further, on roads that were paved until we came within a few miles of COO.  Tom pointed out some things as we got closer—a fenced in soccer field, USAID stamps on houses and pumps—but Margaret was quiet.  When we finally reached the village, she said only, “There they are. The teachers and kids came out to meet us.  Everybody else is working."

El Salvador: The Van

The guest house in San Salvador was fine.  No hot water and only intermittent electricity didn’t affect us much because we were hardly ever there, being out and about in the VAN on our important business.  When we came home in the evening, we cooled off in the courtyard and ate dinner together at a long table in the main room, talking health care and labor unions and micro-lending, matters few of us knew anything about before the trip. We discussed the continuing political power of the moneyed few and whether the FMLN would ever win a national election.

The FMLN, or Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front, was the umbrella group for the armed opposition during the war. After the peace accords in 1992 it was reconstituted as a political party. The people of our “partner” community—I’ll get around eventually to explaining why I put that word in quotation marks—were all FMLN members, now settled on land granted them by the government as former combatants, really terrible land on the Lempa River near the Pacific Coast, in the hottest part of the country, where the soil was salinized and polluted from cotton production. We, Margaret's little band, tended to see Salvadoran life through FMLN eyes.

The other thing you need to know about El Salvador, if you don't already, is that many Roman Catholic clergy died there before and during the war.  Priests and nuns who supported the poor, which was just about everybody in El Salvador, were gunned down by the armed forces, police or paramilitary groups with no compunction or accountability, in the same way that 60,000 or so peasants were murdered between the late seventies and early nineties. One of the clergy who died was Padre Octavio Ortiz, shot in 1979 while leading a retreat for youth. Our partner community, La Canoa, had renamed itself Comunidad Octavio Ortiz.

In this subtropical city, our VAN was black. Its seats, salvaged rather than original, were also black, and plastic. They sucked sweat from the backs of my thighs and kindly held it in pools, so I could sit in it.  Here’s a picture out one of the van's windows, of the U.S. embassy, a bunker of a place. It's smaller than our embassy in Iraq, whose footprint is said to equal Vatican City’s, but I imagine that both compounds broadcast the same you’d-better-have-an-appointment message.

Margaret and Tom, our in-country guide, had set up meetings for us, lots and lots of meetings.  In the next two days, courtesy of the van and van driver, we attended the church where Ortiz officiated, visited the community center where he died, toured a hospital, talked with hospital workers, and met with FMLN organizers, U.S. Ambassador Rose Likins, the director of USAID in El Salvador, textile union labor leaders, and a Jesuit who shared his analysis of the current situation. I hope this explains why I took so many notes.