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 Ambassador

Tom, who worked for the NGO that arranged our trip, was inclined to lecture. “Feeling guilty is a waste of time,” he said when one of us brought up how many of our tax dollars—more than a million a day at the height of the war—had gone to arming murderers. “Concentrate on learning what these people need now. Lots of Salvadorans say they’re worse off now than before the war.”

So far we hadn’t encountered many Salvadorans. But people Margaret knew well waited for us in the country, in Comunidad Octavio Ortiz. Meanwhile . . . to the embassy!

Apparently it’s possible, while touring a foreign country, to visit the U.S. ambassador and grill him or her about U.S. policy—as long as you make an appointment well in advance. The seven of us dressed up and climbed into the van—60-something Margaret and 20-something Tom, our leaders, Greta and Richard, our married couple, Will (from the plane) and Peter, both repeat visitors, and I.

Richard was already worried that we wouldn’t make it from the guesthouse to the embassy by 9:30.  Yet while the rest of us were staring out the windows of the van—I was fast becoming obsessed by the number of starving dogs running wild through the neighborhoods—Tom asked our new driver, Faustino, to take a quick detour through a part of town where the rich lived. 

San Salvador was a dense city of mostly shabby one- and two-story dwellings. On our detour Tom pointed to red-tile and stucco McMansions on acres of hilly ground enclosed by high walls, with armed guards pacing in front. “Quite a difference, right?” he said, looking back at us from the front passenger seat. 

Richard was lost in reviewing the list of questions we’d prepared for the ambassador. When the van slowed to gawking speed, he looked up and said, “Are we even on the way to the embassy?”  He checked his watch. “We’re going to be late!”

“Take it easy,” Tom said. “We’ll get there.”

We arrived at 9:32. Richard jumped out of the van and loped to the front gate. Turning toward Margaret and me, Tom mimicked Richard: “Are we even on the way to the embassy?  Like, fuck, Richard, shut up.”

Margaret stared at her feet.

After opening our bags and showing our passports, we met Ambassador Rose Likins in an empty room. She sat in a big, comfortable chair; Mark Silverman, country director of USAID (the Agency for International Development) and a former Peace Corps volunteer, sat next to her; and we petitioners occupied folding chairs laid out opposite them in a semicircle.

We worked our way down the list of questions Tom had helped us formulate, asking about factories built by foreign investors where trade unionists were threatened, the police force’s record of rape, the absence of potable water and basic health care in the campo.

Likins, about 40 then, a practiced smile on her face, told us what “an exceptionally challenging year” it had been.  Two earthquakes, affecting two-thirds of the department of Usulatan (where COO was), had left 25% of the population there homeless. The U.S. had provided a great deal of money for both temporary and permanent housing. (She nodded at Silverman.) Like the new governments in Honduras and Nicaragua, El Salvador was finding “constructive ways of looking at things rather than dwelling on the past.”

We pressed Likins about CAFTA, the pending extension of NAFTA to Central America.  The Peace Accords had promised to extend participation in decision-making to popular organizations, but this wasn’t happening. While CAFTA was being fast-tracked through the U.S. Congress, many Salvadorans opposed it.

“The Peace Accords were never meant to address economic issues, only to establish democratic processes,” Likins said. “Trade agreements are government to government.”

So it went. Our little group was talking about providing for a country we’d helped to level. (Those earthquakes had nothing on us.) Ambassador Likins and hard-working Silverman were talking about making the country fit for investment.

The educational value of spending a morning being humored by one's ambassador—that can’t be overestimated.