A Little Salvadoran History and Current Salvadoran Politics

In 1979, five Communist leaders from El Salvador flew in secret to Fidel Castro's Cuba, where they sat down in olive combat fatigues to negotiate the formation of the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN), a paramilitary organisation dedicated to overthrowing the military junta in their homeland.

Little did the idealistic rebels realise, as they smoked cigars and performed perfunctory salutes, that they were pushing the button on a bloody civil war that would last 13 years, kill 75,000, including 35,000 civilians, and spawn a succession of atrocities, on both sides, that were unprecedented even by the standards of Latin America's murderous history.

Today, watching members of the same FMLN, which has now renounced the gun and become El Salvador's second biggest political party, gather beneath a tattered portrait of Che Guevara in the party's regional headquarters in the small town of Usulutan, two hours' drive east of San Salvador, you could be forgiven for wondering if the Cold War ever actually ended.

They wear red T-shirts and call each other "comrade". Some discuss land reform; others talk re-distribution of wealth. Many sport "Che Vive!" bracelets and Guevara-style berets. Most members of the party's regional council are veterans of the armed struggle who can still, if they so desire, insist on being addressed as "Commandant".

Yet these radicals are on the brink of power. Next month El Salvador goes to the polls to elect a new parliament. Two months later, it will elect a new president. Every indication is that El Frente (the Front), as the FMLN is widely known, will achieve the first victory in its history, propelling its charismatic candidate Mauricio Funes, a 49-year-old television presenter, into the presidential palace in San Salvador.

Recent polls put Mr Funes between 6 and 15 points clear of his rival Rodrigo Avila, an uninspiring former police chief representing the Arena party. Voters seem hungry for change, and after two decades of economic liberalisation, are swinging en masse behind Mr Funes.
On the face of it, an FMLN victory would represent the stuff of nightmares for the US: it would be yet another socialist triumph in a region that has in recent years seen the election of Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, and Bolivia's Evo Morales.

But Mauricio Funes doesn't sit neatly in the category of left-wing firebrand. A Hispanic version of David Frost, he hosts a long-running morning chat show, and came to politics after growing increasingly critical of Arena, a party that was formed by army generals during the civil war, and has been in power since El Salvador's peace accords were signed in 1992. Mr Funes only joined the FMLN a few months ago, just before his presidential bid was announced. He preaches pragmatic democracy and responsible capitalism, and stands out at the party's campaign rallies like a sore thumb, in a well-cut suit and tie that provides a stark contrast to the Soviet-era combat uniforms that every other FMLN leader in history has chosen.

Crucially, unlike all of his predecessors, the Funes CV is untarnished by Communism. He never fought in the guerrilla war, but instead styles himself a creature of the centre-left with an Obama-style campaign slogan: "Nace la Esperanza, Viene el Cambio!" (Hope is born. Change is coming!)

El Salvador certainly needs change. A small, but crowded nation, it feels hopelessly divided. The capital, full of neon lights and small skyscrapers, resembles any other prosperous city where international corporations employ a growing middle class. But a short drive into the country, most rural communities are hopelessly impoverished, with millions living in mud shacks, down potholed dirt tracks, on a few dollars a day.

Mr Funes can take the rural poor's support for granted, but he is hoping to ride to power on the coat-tails of El Salvador's middle class. By pulling the FMLN subtly rightwards, and toning down the communist rhetoric, he seems to be succeeding.

Today, the party's distinctive red flag dominates the skyline above gritty urban barrios and rural towns, just as it always has done. But it also flutters in prosperous districts of San Salvador, where affluent professionals have been comforted by Mr Funes's promise to heal social divides that have led to rampant crime.

Aristides Valencia, the FMLN's regional leader in Usulutan, sums up the party's potential divide well. A former guerrilla leader, he has reluctantly decided to swap military fatigues for chinos and T-shirts for the duration of the campaign. But his rhetoric harks back to the old era. He explains that his priorities, should he be elected to office next month, as making sure that a constitutional amendment saying that no Salvadoran may own more than 245 hectares of land is rigidly enforced.

He promises to make sure that local peasant farmers, who produce the coffee and sugar that (aside from manual labour) make up the nation's biggest exports, are allowed to register legal claims to ownership of the fields where they work.

"The armed struggle is in the past, though," he adds. "The concept of Communism versus socialism, versus capitalism, belongs to another era. In a real democracy, in the democracy we are fighting to create, many points of view can be held together. People change, parties change."
El Salvador: Facts and figures

*One of Central America's smallest and most densely populated countries, with close to 7 million inhabitants, although 2 million Salvadorans live abroad.

*El Salvador's rich, volcanic soil is highly fertile, but a few rich landowners control a peasant population.

*The civil war, which ended in 1992, killed 70,000 people. Many citizens fled to the US.

*The capital, San Salvador, is infamous for its gang violence, with one of the highest murder
rates in the world. The two major gangs are Mara 18 and Mara Salvatrucha.

*El Salvador lies on a geological faultline which makes it vulnerable to earthquakes and volcanic activity. An earthquake in 2001 caused landslides, killing more than 800 people and damaging 130,000 homes.

*El Salvador, Spanish for "the saviour", dropped its own currency, the colon, in 2001 for the US dollar.

WORLD AIDS DAY

The reeducation of the people needs to be the first step in the prevention of this terrible dieses along with adequate medical care for those already infected. Even a recognizition by the government of El Salvador that this is not just a one country problem but a worldwide problem. We have come so far in prevention and education yet there are those who still are not even aware of what a danger this really is. Lets all pray for education and medical improvements this worlds aids Day. The following article explains the effects on el Salvador.

SAN SALVADOR, Nov 30 (IPS) - The rise in new HIV/AIDS cases in El Salvador shows either that the government strategy to combat the epidemic is failing, or that a larger proportion of the population is being tested, depending on the respective viewpoints of non-governmental organisations and local authorities.María de la Paz was diagnosed HIV-positive in March 2004.

At first "it was very difficult; I didn’t want to accept that I had the virus. I went through a phase when I was stigmatised and discriminated against by my partner’s family, and for weeks I just wanted the earth to swallow me up." Then she found doctors who convinced her that she "was a human being, with a right to live," and helped her get over the death of her partner in 2004, from AIDS. María de la Paz is just one of thousands of Salvadorans living with HIV.

According to the health authorities, the epidemic has gained ground in 2007, after two successive years with slightly lower numbers of new infections. From January through October, 1,872 new infections were reported, an average of 6.2 new cases a day in this Central American country of seven million people, according to the Ministry of Public Health and Social Assistance (MSPAS). In 2006, the authorities registered 1,705 new cases, and 1,625 in 2005, down from 2,089 in 2004. Civil society organisations say the resurgence of the disease is due to the lack of comprehensive programmes to combat it. By law, the Public Health and Social Assistance Ministry (MSPAS) in El Salvador provides universal treatment for HIV/AIDS, including

antiretroviral therapy, but in fact services are mostly centralised in hospitals in the capital, and do not necessarily reach all rural areas, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO).

According to the MSPAS, the increase is due to a rise in the number of people taking HIV tests, which means more cases are detected. However, the health authorities themselves, international organisations and civil society groups all agree that under-reporting of HIV/AIDS infections is at least 50 percent. "Although the overall numbers are greater, we’re sure they do not reflect an increase in the epidemic, but rather a higher proportion of cases being detected," said Rodrigo Simán, the head of the National Programme of Sexually Transmitted Infections and HIV/AIDS. Dr. Jeannette Alvarado, head of the Maquilishuat Foundation (FUMA), said the epidemic was showing no signs of abating, in spite of the Salvadoran government’s commitment to the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to halt the spread of HIV/AIDS by 2015.

In September 2000, the United Nations member countries pledged to achieve eight MDGs to drastically reduce extreme poverty and hunger, serious illnesses, inequality and pollution. The state anti-HIV/AIDS campaign is attempting to project the image that every effort is being made to combat the disease, but the government’s promise that "there will be no new cases by 2015 is not being fulfilled; on the contrary, new infections are increasing all the time," Alvarado told IPS. She said there were two major defects in official policies to combat the epidemic: "The lack of an educational policy for prevention, and lack of follow-up of diagnosed cases."

The Joint U.N. Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) says in its 2007 AIDS Epidemic Update report that "global HIV prevalence has levelled off, and the number of new infections has fallen," which is attributed by international experts to improvements in medication. According to the report, 2.1 million people died of AIDS this year, while 2.5 million new infections occurred, equivalent to 6,800 new cases a day. A total of 33.2 million people are currently living with HIV worldwide, it adds. Another UNAIDS report, presented in Nicaragua in early November at the Central American Congress on STI/HIV/AIDS (CONCASIDA 2007), indicated that 208,600 people are living with HIV in Central America. In El Salvador and Guatemala, 0.9 percent of the population are HIV-positive. The total number of medically confirmed HIV-positive people in El Salvador is 19,890. MSPAS records indicate that 4,754 people have died of AIDS in the last 10 years. Of those newly infected, 61 percent are men and 39 percent women.

Sixty-six percent of infections occur in people between the ages of 25 and 49. Sexual transmission remains the predominant infection route, causing 92 percent of cases, particularly heterosexual relations, which are responsible for 81 percent. Many people "lack adequate and timely medical care," the education programme coordinator for the Foundation to Prevent, Educate and Support People Living with HIV/AIDS (FUNDASIDA), Laura Valladares, told IPS. "Even the slightest increase in the number of infections should concern us," said the activist, in response to government statements that infections are not rising, but rather, more of them are being diagnosed. María de la Paz is now working for FUNDASIDA, and is receiving antiretroviral treatment. She is determined to fight for her life, and to work at "educating the general public, in order to stop the spread of AIDS," she says. (END/2007)

Israel Recognizes El Salvador's Holocaust Role

(Caption Picture: A panel at the Embassy of El Salvador discusses the role that two men, both working for El Salvador, played in saving approximately 30,000 Jews.)

In a time when the jewish population of England was in danger of being exterminated at a very quick pace. A small country in El Salvador stepped up to the plate to offer citizenship to those that were in danger of being sent to a concentration camp. In honor of that El Salvador honored by Prime Minister Tzipi Livni in a ceremony showing how big El Salvador’s hearts are in a time of unprecedented tyranny by an evil dictator...

Link to Original Article Click Here

Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni is presenting a special Certificate of Commemoration on Tuesday to El Salvadoran Foreign Minister Marisol Argueta de Barillas in tribute to her country's policy of saving Jews during the Holocaust.
The certificate, which will be presented to Foreign Minister Barillas after a working lunch, states:
"The government and people of Israel extend their deepest gratitude to the El Salvadoran government, which, by issuing El Salvadoran citizenship papers at the consulate in Geneva, headed by Consul-General José Arturo Castellanos Contreras, contributed to saving perhaps as many as 30,000 persecuted European Jews during the Second World War."

During the Second World War, Contreras issued thousands of false citizenship papers to Jews from central Europe, mainly from Hungary. In 1942, he appointed a Transylvanian-born Jewish businessman named György Mandl as the consulate's "First Secretary," a fictitious title that does not exist in the Salvadoran diplomatic hierarchy, in order to enable him to issue the life-saving papers. These documents enabled whole families to register as citizens of El Salvador and avoid deportation to Nazi concentration camps.

In July 1944, El Salvador requested that Switzerland act as the protector of its citizens in Hungary, at the time under Nazi occupation. As far as it is known, the vast majority of El Salvadoran citizens in Hungary at that time were Jews who received their citizenship papers from the consulate in Geneva.

On Monday, Foreign Minister Barillas toured Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Museum. The El Salvadoran government is seeking to have Contreras officially declared Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem.

A 2008 documentary called "Glass House" told the story of Contreras' heroic efforts. It was directed and produced by husband and wife Brad and Leonor Avila Marlowe.

Arch Bishop refuses to Persecute those Responsible

After 19 years the arch bishop still refuses to persecute those responsible for the horrendous murder of the Jesuit priest. The Decision I do not quite understand yet there are many unsolved crimes during this time this one just happened to be the most famous..


SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador (AP) — The Roman Catholic archbishop of San Salvador opposes reopening the prosecution of Salvadoran officials in the 1989 massacre of six Jesuit priests, the cleric said Sunday.

Human rights activists have pushed for a trial of a former president and 14 other Salvadoran officials in Spain, where five of the killed Jesuits were born.

Archbishop Fernando Saenz Lacalle called the killings at the height of the country's 1980-92 civil war "a frightful crime," but said he was sure that former President Alfredo Cristiani was not involved.

"Opening this case in another country's courts won't help the process of domestic reconciliation," he said. "El Salvador's affairs should be resolved in El Salvador."
The Jesuit order in El Salvador also decided not to participate in the Spanish case, Jesuit university rector Father Jose Maria Tojeira said.

Activists said a former defense minister was present at a meeting where the attack was planned on the Jesuits, whom the army accused of supporting leftist rebels. The human rights groups said Cristiani helped to cover up the crime.

A housekeeper and her daughter also died in the attack.

Spanish courts sometimes invoke the principle of universal jurisdiction, which allows for the prosecution of crimes against humanity and other grave offenses such as terrorism, even in another country.

A trial over the massacre was held in El Salvador in 1991, but only two of the 10 defendants were convicted of murder and they were released early from their 30-year sentences under a 1993 amnesty, human rights groups said. Others convicted of lesser charges did not go to jail at all, they added.

Cristiani signed a 1992 peace accord with leftist rebels that put an end to a civil war that killed 75,000 people.