Venezuela and El Salvador swept Wednesday's archery competitions in the third Cuban Sporting Olympiad, respectively taking three and one gold medals in Sancti Spiritus, 360 km from Cuban capital Havana.

Rigoberto Hernandez of El Salvador won the men's compound bow with 323 points, and Venezuela's Gary Hernandez got silver. Cuba's Lisbany Fardales won bronze.  (from People's Daily Online)

By Derrick Z. Jackson, [Boston] Globe Columnist  |  April 26, 2006

First of two parts
AS AUXILIARY bishop of San Salvador, Gregorio Rosa Chavez wonders if the United States learned anything from its murderous meddling in his nation. He remembers reading a magazine article shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, about how Americans surround themselves with information but much of it ''frivolous and superfluous." He said the article talked about how such shallow knowledge leads to US foreign policy being based on the moment, ''only looking at our navel as if the world ended at the border with Mexico."

Rosa Chavez wondered if the attacks would wake up the United States to look beyond the navel. He wondered if Americans would truly begin to ponder the question of ''Why do they hate us?" After the unprovoked invasion of Iraq under false pretenses in 2003, the answer was a terrible no.

''Pope John Paul called the war a 'defeat for humanity,' " Rosa Chavez said. ''The pope gave his condolences to the American people for Sept. 11. But we also needed to enter a new understanding that we are one world where we only have a future together if we get rid of barriers and walls. Preemptive war makes no sense . . . I worry the US will have to ask again, 'Why do they hate us?' "

Rosa Chavez was in Cambridge last week to receive the Romero Truth Award from Centro Presente, a Latino immigrant advocacy organization. The award is named for Oscar Arnulfo Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop who was assassinated in 1980, presumably by a right-wing death squad. The assassination was part of a 1980-1992 civil war between leftist guerrillas and a US-backed right-wing government that resulted in at least 75,000 deaths and thousands more disappeared.

Rosa Chavez said Iraq means that El Salvador is a lesson unlearned. The Reagan and first Bush administrations gave the Salvadoran government $6 billion in economic and military aid during the war. Rosa Chavez and the Catholic church condemned atrocities on both sides but was often threatened by the government because its pleas for human rights for peasants were seen as too far to the left.

No amount of killings mattered to anti-communist hard-liners in Washington, not even the murders of four Maryknoll nuns from the United States and six Jesuit priests. One such hard-liner was then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney. Intelligence documents released in 1993 indicated that Cheney opposed attempts by members of Congress to withhold military aid to El Salvador during that government's slothful investigation of the murder of the priests. In a 1989 appearance on ABC's ''This Week with David Brinkley," Cheney claimed there was ''no indication at all" that the Salvadoran government or the army were involved.

Documents and soldier confessions in the mid- and late-1990s showed that the killings of the priests and nuns were directly tied to the military, and the Reagan administration suppressed and overlooked intelligence on state-sponsored terror links. As late as 1990, US military officers were training well-to-do Salvadorans linked to death squads.

A decade later, Vice President Cheney turned that legacy upside down, trumping up discredited intelligence to invade Iraq. In the 2004 vice presidential debate, he had the nerve to use El Salvador as an example of what would happen in Afghanistan and Iraq. He boasted, ''we held free elections. I was there as an observer on behalf of the Congress. . . . And today El Salvador is a whale of a lot better because we held free elections."

This is after he refused to ''observe" how we sponsored so many of the 75,000 deaths over the 12 years of the Reagan and first Bush administrations.

Rosa Chavez, part of the religious vanguard that risked life for peace and elections, remembers a whale of a lot more than Cheney, enough to fear for the future of Iraq. He remembers US ambassadors denying witness protection and cruelly interrogating courageous people who came forward with information on the state-sponsored terror. ''It was really terrible because (US) politics were not based on values and human rights," he said. ''During the war, I had to receive many US delegations, and frequently I got the impression they really did not care about the people. It was painful.

''I would say the Salvadoran case is even worse than Iraq. In Iraq, the US sent its army. In the Salvadoran case, the arms came from outside, but the deaths are all Salvadorans."

Associated Press BAYVIEW, Texas – The men who filled the painted metal chairs of the immigration detention center chapel have come the farthest – from Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala and Brazil.

They're dressed in the dark blue uniform of first-time offenders, as opposed to the orange or red uniforms that mark criminals or those who have repeatedly tried to cross the border. Many look young, thin and listless.

For the past 15 years, the Rev. Mike Seifert has come to wash their feet and celebrate Mass with them during the Holy Week before Easter – a time when many Christians commemorate Jesus Christ's last days before crucifixion, when he washed his disciples' feet in a show of humility.

"These are the feet of people who have walked a long way, and the vast majority of them came because of their family," Father Seifert said. "When I think of the whole immigration debate, I think, 'Who is it that we're talking about?' Very specific people. People who basically wash our feet. They're the ones that do the humblest jobs in the nation."

The Catholic Church believes the right to seek a better life is God-given. Father Seifert and other clergy have spearheaded protests over legislation in Congress that would further criminalize illegal immigration.

(Prensa Latina, Havana, Cuba) With just 40 days in force, the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the US already has negative effects for the Salvadoran people, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) has denounced Thursday.

The government modified various laws such as royalties and copyrights that give unlimited privileges to transnationals and force prosecution of pirated material sellers.

Last week the police carried out a raid in San Salvador to catch sellers and seize their products, resulting in the injury of several people and 20 arrested on charges of terrorism, public disorder and aggravated damages.

... importation of agriculture products, basic beans, chicken and cattle meat among other duty-free goods have increased in these 40 days, warning this will cause serious problems to small and medium farmers, who are gradually disappearing.

Reform of America's immigration laws has stalled. Will this week's huge demonstrations revive or smother it?

IN FRANCE the nation's youth marched for the right to work half-heartedly and not be sacked. By contrast, hundreds of thousands of immigrants in more than 100 American cities marched for a chance to work hard and not be deported. The French demonstrators forced their government to back down (see article). The mostly Latino masses on America's streets, despite impressive numbers, less violence and a worthier cause, are still some way from victory.

Last week, the Senate failed to pass a reform of the country's dysfunctional immigration system. The bill, sponsored by Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Mel Martinez of Florida, both Republicans, would have combined tougher border controls with a path towards legalisation for most of the estimated 11m illegal immigrants who are already inside the United States. Most senators thought the bill good enough to pass; it was a compromise between more restrictive and more generous proposals. But it was scuppered by obstructionists from both parties just before the Senate closed for a two-week recess.

Nearly 30 people who marched outside Fort Benning last November are reporting to prison.

A news release from SOA Watch says 29 protesters are going behind bars Tuesday, joining four already there. In all, 37 people will serve time in prison for crossing the line onto post last year.  An estimated 19,000 demonstrators gathered outside Fort Benning.

The SOA Watch statement also claims Argentina and Uruguay no longer will allow officers to train at the successor to the School of the Americas. A spokesman for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation e-mailed wtvm.com in response.  Lee Rials writes: "I don't doubt the accuracy of their quotes from those countries, but I also don't know what that will mean in the long term. Uruguay has not sent students recently, and Argentina only a few.  We will have to wait and see."

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According to the Department of Defense, "WHINSEC shall provide professional education and training to eligible personnel of nations of the Western Hemisphere within the context of the democratic principles set forth in the Charter of the Organization of American States, while fostering mutual knowledge, openness, confidence, and cooperation among the participating nations and promoting democratic values, respect for human rights, and knowledge and understanding of United States customs and traditions."

Laffe explained, “We arrived at San Salvador airport on the Saturday, a week before the elections, without any problems and entered the queue for immigration. An immigration police official separated all four of us out from the line. I should explain that you don’t need a visa to enter El Salvador, if you are Venezuelan, being a tourist or possession of an invitation is sufficient.

“It felt very uncomfortable, because there was no reason for them to do it. We hadn’t done anything wrong and it was just because we were Venezuelans. They didn’t let us call anyone — the FMLN or even our own diplomatic representative in San Salvador. I bought a $5 telephone card but the first call wasn’t successful. When I tried to make a second call, they stopped me.

For the rest of this see http://www.greenleft.org.au/back/2006/664/664p14e.htm

It was a sunny midafternoon in a shiny new global-economy mall in San Salvador, the capital city of El Salvador, and a young woman I was hoping to meet appeared to be getting cold feet. She had agreed to rendezvous with a go-between not far from the Payless shoe store and then come to a nearby hotel to talk to me. She was an hour late. Alone in the hotel lobby, I was feeling nervous; I was stood up the day before by another woman in a similar situation. I had been warned that interviewing anyone who had had an abortion in El Salvador would be difficult. The problem was not simply that in this very Catholic country a shy 24-year-old unmarried woman might feel shame telling her story to an older man. There was also the criminal stigma. And this was why I had come to El Salvador: Abortion is a serious felony here for everyone involved, including the woman who has the abortion. Some young women are now serving prison sentences, a few as long as 30 years.

For the rest of this New York Times story by Jack Hitt go to http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/magazine/09abortion.html

Eileen B. Lynch was a supporter of world peace and backed up her beliefs with trips to El Salvador, where she helped people get food and work while civil war was going on in that country.

(March 28) Half a million people poured into the streets of Los Angeles on Saturday to protest the various Republican-sponsored proposals in Congress that would demonize illegal immigrants. Hundreds marched yesterday in Detroit, which, last I checked, is nowhere near the Mexican border. Tens of thousands have demonstrated in Phoenix, Denver and other cities across the country. In every case, the crowds were mostly Latino.

We all know that Latinos are the nation's largest minority and that most of the people in those demonstrations either were born in the United States or are here legally. But we also know that at least some of those protesters had gone through the experience of crossing the border illegally under the tutelage of avaricious people-smugglers known as "coyotes." At least some had been here for months or years, working to send money home to their families, keeping their heads down, somehow managing to carve out lives for themselves and their children.

See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/27/AR2006032701302.html for the rest of this commentary.

(Prensa Latina) Presidents Alvaro Uribe, Colombia, and Elias Antonio Saca, El Salvador, are discussing Monday in Bogota a bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) and other issues of mutual interest.

Saca, who arrived in Bogota on Sunday evening, will be officially received today at the Executive office by his Colombian counterpart to discuss the FTA, tourism and hemispherical security, as well as their common fight against drug-trafficking, arm smuggling, money laundering and international crime.