Friday, April 16, 2004
on the air
That's right! Yours truly, along with my amazing comrades Cora, Yeni, y Susan give a brief interview as a part of the Radio Olín show on KPFA tomorrow night. Tune in tomorrow, 4/16/04 at 8:00pm at www.kpfa.org to hear about our analysis and observations during the recent presidential elections in El Salvador.
Thursday, April 08, 2004
Back from El Salvador
Hey folks,
It's been a while, hey? So I went to El Salvador to observe the presidential elections, that happened on March 21. For information about this, check out the CISPES website.
I have many pictures to post. Yay! I am also planning a reportback, so if you're in the Bay Area, maybe you can go! That would be neat.
The trip was amazing. I was only there for two weeks, but it was a huge wake-up call, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to CISPES, my comrades, and the Salvadorans who were kind enough to host and teach us.
Things that were mightily impressed upon me:
So these and other thoughts are what I'm chewing on in my brain at the moment. Upon my return I felt like large parts of the US left were about as relevant as a popsicle stand in Antarctica, and I haven't quite shaken that feeling yet. It was nice to be learning from and around people who had clearly prioritized meeting the basic needs of the people: food, housing, healthcare, education, wages/right to organize/labor struggles, women's rights.
Other trip highlights: we got to meet with some amazing labor leaders, we went to the site of Archbishop Oscar Romero's assasination and participated in the annual march in honor of his life on the anniversary of his death.
We met with representatives at the U.S. Embassy - a veritable fortress to behold. They told us useful things, like that they were desperately trying to dispel the myth that the US would change immigration policy towards Salvadorans in the US or that remittances would stop if the Frente won, but to no avail. Given the historical precendent of power the US and our Embassy have held in El Salvador, our delegation found this somewhat hard to believe. During this visit, a fellow from USAID in the economics bureau informed us -- with a straight face, no less -- that he was helping Salvadorans prepare for economic competition [read: devastation] that would be wrought with the implementation of CAFTA by, I kid you not, a direct quote: exporting pupusas. The pupusa is a revered Salvadoran food, it's kind of like a stuffed tortilla, usually filled with cheese, beans & cheese, or ground meat. They're notoriously best right off the griddle, and owing to the fact that there are 2 million Salvadorans in the U.S. already, you yourself could possibly encounter them in person. Which is part of the ridiculousness of the pupusa-export economy: within a 2-block radius of my house, I can find a total of FOUR pupuserias. Where there are Salvadorans, there are pupuserias. I sincerely doubt the willingness of Salvadorans in the U.S. to purchase, defrost, and consume vast quantities of imported pupusas, nor will that shore up the great economic divide between El Salvador and one of the largest economies IN THE WORLD. *I* don't need an economics degree to tell you that. You don't need one to believe me! Yet our tax dollars employ people who spend their days trying to convince us that this ludicrous statement is sound economic policy! No, really! Sound! Economic! Policy! OK, calming down now.
No, CAFTA will do exactly what it intends to: privatize all of El Salvador's remaining public services and contract them to US corporations; expand the already formidable maquilladora sector (to get a sense of what this is like, if you don't already know, check out a report on a maquilla called Copatex in El Salvador by the National Labor Committee, where labor rights are constantly violated and these are often synonymous with women's rights, as maquilla workers are disproportionately women (also see this Human Rights Watch report). We met with former maquilla workers who had been fired for trying to demand basic human rights or for attempting to organize in their workplaces. CAFTA will also allow corporations to SUE governments for regulations, such as ENVIRONMENTAL regulations, on the grounds that it restricts the corporations' free trade. Think I'm kidding? It's already happened. Yep, because of our dear friend NAFTA, cases like this, where a US corporation sued the government of Mexico for preventing them from reopening a toxic waste treatment facility because it would violate Mexico's environmental regulations AND WON, can occur. And CAFTA provides the same clause that allowed this NAFTA nightmare to occur.
Heavens, I'm going on! OK, maybe that's all for tonight. Pictures and more stories to follow.
Yours in blogitude,
-Max
It's been a while, hey? So I went to El Salvador to observe the presidential elections, that happened on March 21. For information about this, check out the CISPES website.
I have many pictures to post. Yay! I am also planning a reportback, so if you're in the Bay Area, maybe you can go! That would be neat.
The trip was amazing. I was only there for two weeks, but it was a huge wake-up call, and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to CISPES, my comrades, and the Salvadorans who were kind enough to host and teach us.
Things that were mightily impressed upon me:
- U.S. intervention in El Salvador still sucks mightily. Yep, it didn't end with the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992. Between the remarks of Roger Noriega, Otto Reich, and Sen. Thomas Tancredo (R - Colorado), the people of El Salvador were threatened with deportation of their relatives working in the US (2 million Salvadorans in the US presently, 6.5 Salvadorans in El Salvador iteself) if Shafik Hándal, the FMLN candidate, were to have won. They were threatened with the halt of remittances of money from relatives and friends in the US, which make 1/6th of the Salvadoran economy if the FMLN won. Not exactly the conditions for "free and fair elections", these threats were plastered on the overwhelmingly right-wing daily papers, and were advertised on the radio stations, most of whom are owned by the ARENA candidate/president-select.
- Fraud, anyone? I learned the ins and outs of how to buy and sell votes in El Salvador, including the sale of ID cards used by voters at the polls and the importation of "professional voters" from Nicaragua and Honduras. I think I'm going to draw a cartoon about that, so stay tuned. Tooned. Whatever.
- The Right wing in the U.S. knew why it was worthwhile to interevene in El Salvador's democratic processes, so why didn't the Left? Or at least, why didn't they say/do anything about it? OK, here I'm not talking about organizations who've done work in solidarity with El Salvador for years and years. Nor the dear Pacifica affiliates and Democracy Now!, who provided what little coverage the Salvadoran Elections got here outside of the Spanish-language press. But the Right knew that if Shafik were elected, the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) could have been killed once and for all, and them and their corporate buddies want to make sure that doesn't happen. CAFTA goes before US Congress in June, so learn more about it and fight it.
- La lucha continua. After all was said and done, and the polls finally came in (no matter how much fraud took place), the people of El Salvador are stuck with another five years of the ARENA government. Ugh. We in the delegation were feeling a bit downtrodden by the results, but in the province where I was an observer, the local Frente folks came and picked *us* up off the floor. Of course the struggle continues! It was good they got the percentage that we did, and now the next fight is the one against CAFTA - these are the kind of things that we heard. Not to say that people weren't also struggling and disappointed by the results, but what a refreshing and understandable perspective. One that I felt I could use more of here in the States. One I want to be able to cultivate in myself. Given the history of struggle against US imperialism in El Salvador, the amount of courage and fortitude to continue in the face of another blow is both completely necessary and amazing to me.
So these and other thoughts are what I'm chewing on in my brain at the moment. Upon my return I felt like large parts of the US left were about as relevant as a popsicle stand in Antarctica, and I haven't quite shaken that feeling yet. It was nice to be learning from and around people who had clearly prioritized meeting the basic needs of the people: food, housing, healthcare, education, wages/right to organize/labor struggles, women's rights.
Other trip highlights: we got to meet with some amazing labor leaders, we went to the site of Archbishop Oscar Romero's assasination and participated in the annual march in honor of his life on the anniversary of his death.
We met with representatives at the U.S. Embassy - a veritable fortress to behold. They told us useful things, like that they were desperately trying to dispel the myth that the US would change immigration policy towards Salvadorans in the US or that remittances would stop if the Frente won, but to no avail. Given the historical precendent of power the US and our Embassy have held in El Salvador, our delegation found this somewhat hard to believe. During this visit, a fellow from USAID in the economics bureau informed us -- with a straight face, no less -- that he was helping Salvadorans prepare for economic competition [read: devastation] that would be wrought with the implementation of CAFTA by, I kid you not, a direct quote: exporting pupusas. The pupusa is a revered Salvadoran food, it's kind of like a stuffed tortilla, usually filled with cheese, beans & cheese, or ground meat. They're notoriously best right off the griddle, and owing to the fact that there are 2 million Salvadorans in the U.S. already, you yourself could possibly encounter them in person. Which is part of the ridiculousness of the pupusa-export economy: within a 2-block radius of my house, I can find a total of FOUR pupuserias. Where there are Salvadorans, there are pupuserias. I sincerely doubt the willingness of Salvadorans in the U.S. to purchase, defrost, and consume vast quantities of imported pupusas, nor will that shore up the great economic divide between El Salvador and one of the largest economies IN THE WORLD. *I* don't need an economics degree to tell you that. You don't need one to believe me! Yet our tax dollars employ people who spend their days trying to convince us that this ludicrous statement is sound economic policy! No, really! Sound! Economic! Policy! OK, calming down now.
No, CAFTA will do exactly what it intends to: privatize all of El Salvador's remaining public services and contract them to US corporations; expand the already formidable maquilladora sector (to get a sense of what this is like, if you don't already know, check out a report on a maquilla called Copatex in El Salvador by the National Labor Committee, where labor rights are constantly violated and these are often synonymous with women's rights, as maquilla workers are disproportionately women (also see this Human Rights Watch report). We met with former maquilla workers who had been fired for trying to demand basic human rights or for attempting to organize in their workplaces. CAFTA will also allow corporations to SUE governments for regulations, such as ENVIRONMENTAL regulations, on the grounds that it restricts the corporations' free trade. Think I'm kidding? It's already happened. Yep, because of our dear friend NAFTA, cases like this, where a US corporation sued the government of Mexico for preventing them from reopening a toxic waste treatment facility because it would violate Mexico's environmental regulations AND WON, can occur. And CAFTA provides the same clause that allowed this NAFTA nightmare to occur.
Heavens, I'm going on! OK, maybe that's all for tonight. Pictures and more stories to follow.
Yours in blogitude,
-Max
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