Why I Won't be Hailing the Chief in El Salvador

[Judi Lynn]

Weekend Edition
March 18 - 20, 2011

Resistance and Repression
Why I Won't be Hailing the Chief in El Salvador
By ALEXANDRA EARLY

San Salvador.

President Obama’s visit to El Salvador this week has become a focal point for protest organizing by Central American social movement organizations and their North American allies, who are equally outraged about U.S. trade policy and military meddling in the region.Local environmental and community organizations have joined together with allies like U.S. - El Salvador Sister Cities and CISPES to help mobilize students and workers for rallies in the U.S. and El Salvador on Tuesday, March 22, when Obama arrives for a meeting with Salvadoran President Mauricio Funes, whose election two years ago ended decades of right-wing rule.

Despite the initial jubilation at both Obama’s and Funes’s electoral victories, both the Salvadoran left and members of the international solidarity community are deeply disappointed and frustrated with Obama’s stance toward Central America. The purpose of Obama´s visit is supposedly to support the eradication of poverty, violence and government corruption. Yet, the president’s own administration is perpetuating these problems (and their natural result, immigration) by following in the footprints of Bill Clinton, both George Bushes, and even Ronald Reagan, who spent billions of dollars wreaking human rights havoc in El Salvador and its neighbors.

Current U.S. policy on Central America reflects more continuity than change, particularly with regard to the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and the 2009 military coup in Honduras that forced then-president Manual (“Mel”) Zelaya out of office and into exile.

It has been six years since the passage of CAFTA. As predicted by its critics, free trade has not reduced economic inequality or created many new jobs. Exports from El Salvador and foreign investment in the country have both decreased; meanwhile, the price of goods has dramatically increased while the number of small businesses able to sell products to the U.S. has not.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/early03182011.html

[DCKit]

1. A friend from El Salvador casually mentioned to me last week that U.S. policy...

has pretty much turned the entire country into a crime-ridden sweatshop.

Just sayin'.

[Angry Dragon]

2. Coming soon to a neighborhood near you

[Judi Lynn]

3. Startling news concerning Honduras which has been stonewalled by our corporate media!

From the same article:

~snip~
Since the military coup 21 months ago, and Lobo’s tainted election in November, 2009, the U.S. has built two new military bases in Honduras and increased its training of local police. Meanwhile, nearly all sectors of Honduran society—union organizers, farmers and teachers, women and young people, gays, journalists, political activists,—have faced violent repression under Lobo’s corrupt regime. With its worsening record of murders, disappearances and rabid resistance to land reform, Honduras is beginning to look more and more like El Salvador before it slipped into full-scale civil warfare three decades ago, with the U.S. backing the wrong side then and now.

In January, I witnessed first-hand what life is like under the “golpistas” of Honduras as part of a fact-finding delegation led by the Honduras Accompaniment Project. We spent a week in the Honduran capitol and countryside interviewing multiple victims of recent political threats, beatings, jailings, and kidnappings. Human rights groups estimate that more than 4,000 serious human rights violations and sixty-four political assassinations have occurred in Honduras since the coup. Many organizers have been forced to leave the country as the threats against themselves and their families increase.

Young people are now a frequent target of death threats and actual violence, often from police or resurgent of death squads seemingly bent on “social cleansing.” Like El Salvador, Honduras has very strong “anti-gang” legislation that enables cops to arrest youth who gather in groups or on the basis of their appearance. Since the coup, it’s not just suspicious tattoos that draw police attention. Police drag-nets now target anyone wearing t-shirts or hats with anti-government messages, not to mention the threatening visages of Che or Chavez. As youth organizer Victor Alejandro explained, “many Honduran youth woke up politically when the coup began, when they were beaten up or arrested by the police at a march or just for walking down the street. And now they are one of the driving forces behind the resistance, and as a result they are one of the main targets of state repression.”

As always in Central America, organized campesinos are a target of repression. During our stay, we visited Zacate Grande, a sparsely populated peninsula in the Gulf of Fonseca where small tenant farmers and fisherman are fighting eviction by rich businessmen who want to build luxury hotels and summer homes on their land. One source of hope and optimism for Hondurans like these was Decree 18-2008, the land reform measure enacted under President Zelaya. It created a mechanism for the expropriation of unused private lands for subsistence farming and a way for the poor to gain title to land they had worked for years. Not surprisingly, in January, the Supreme Court of Honduras ruled that Zelaya’s land reform decree was unconstitutional.

So much more goes on BEHIND our backs WITH the use of U.S. citizens' taxdollars than we could ever imagine.