but he was happy for a while...

(Reuters) - Tropical forests that house El Salvador's famed coffee plantations and provide habitat for migrating birds are being depleted at an alarming rate, scientists warned on Tuesday.

Between 2001 and 2004, the country lost 21,025 hectares of forest-covered coffee farms, Mario Acosta, president of El Salvador's Foundation for Coffee Research (Procafe), said.

El Salvador last year planted around 161,000 hectares of coffee, the vast majority of it grown on wooded plantations.

With the greatest population density and smallest land size in Central America, El Salvador was long ago cleared of virtually all its native forest. Coffee farms, where bourbon variety coffee trees flourish under a thick shade canopy, provide 75 percent of El Salvador's remaining forest cover.

The dramatic losses took place during a sustained period of record-low coffee prices which led many farmers to abandon their land, in some cases ceding it to encroaching urban expansion.

In recent years, environmental groups have embraced El Salvador's coffee industry, noting the role it plays providing habitat for migrating birds and other wildlife.

The El Salvadoran coffee industry shed some 70,000 jobs during the period of low prices and now employs about 90,000 people directly.

The country exported 1.3 million 60-kg bags of coffee in the 2004/05 coffee year, generating income of $164.5 million.

Despite being the country's the main agricultural export, coffee income is a fraction of the over $2 billion the country receives annually from the estimated 25 percent of its population that lives abroad, mainly in the United States.

From the New York Times

WASHINGTON, May 15 — The headline news from President Bush's immigration speech on Monday was troops to the border, but in substance and tone the address reflected the more subtle approach of a man shaped by Texas border-state politics and longtime personal views.

...But the real theme of his speech was that the nation can be, as he phrased it, "a lawful society and a welcoming society at the same time" and that Congress could find a middle ground between deporting illegal immigrants and granting them immediate citizenship.

What was remarkable to people who knew Mr. Bush in Texas was how much he still believes in the power of immigration to invigorate the nation.

"He's always had a more welcoming attitude," said Bruce Buchanan, a presidential scholar at the University of Texas. "He always spoke well of Mexican nationals and regarded them as hard-working people. So his grace notes on this subject are high."

...It is also unclear if Congress can even enact an immigration bill this year when the Senate is pushing a temporary guest worker program and the House favors a harsher, enforcement-only approach. So far Mr. Bush, who insists he is not advocating amnesty, has spoken favorably of the Senate approach — a position consistent with his views in the past.

"He understands this community in the way you do when you live in a border state," said Israel Hernandez, an assistant secretary at the Commerce Department who traveled with Mr. Bush as a personal aide when he first ran for governor. "Philosophically, he understands why people want to come to the U.S. And he doesn't consider them a threat."

There were no major battles over immigration or immigration legislation when Mr. Bush was governor, but he is remembered for saying emphatically that the children of illegal immigrants had a right to go to Texas schools. His views were in sharp contrast to those of another politician of the time, Pete Wilson, ....

For the rest of the article go to http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/16/washington/16assess.html?ex=1305432000&en=9f8caef22e5ae525&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Washington Post Foreign Service

LA UNION, El Salvador -- It is hard to overstate how much this tiny Central American nation has benefited from the estimated $2.8 billion that Salvadoran immigrants in the United States send back to their relatives each year.

Without it, the portion of families who live in extreme poverty would jump from 6 percent to 37 percent, according to a recent study by the United Nations Development Program.

Yet economists have become increasingly concerned that the flood of U.S. dollars may also be driving up the cost of living in El Salvador, forcing ever-larger numbers of Salvadorans to leave for the United States -- where their presence, along with that of other illegal immigrants, has already triggered a fierce debate.

"You've basically got this vicious circle going on, and it's only going to get worse," said Katharine Andrade-Eekhoff, one of the El Salvador-based authors of the U.N. study.

Estimates of the overall Salvadoran population in the United States, including legal immigrants, vary from 1 million to more than double that. Salvadorans are the largest immigrant group in the Washington area.

Part of the problem driving the migration wave, noted Andrade-Eekhoff, is the fact that most families need the money they get from their relatives in the United States for necessities such as food, clothing and housing. That leaves little for long-term investments that could improve El Salvador's economy.

With more dollars chasing limited commodities such as land and housing, prices are rising. And because El Salvador imports most of its goods from nations that can make them less expensively, the consumption boom isn't creating an increase in jobs. Meanwhile, the ready supply of desperate workers from the even poorer Central American countries of Nicaragua and Honduras keeps down wages for existing low-skill jobs -- making it difficult for the Salvadorans who hold them to make ends meet.

The impact of this dynamic is visible across this eastern stretch of the country, from which much of the Salvadoran migration to the United States has originated.

On small, family-run dairy farms that have dotted the area for generations, most ranch hands tending the cows these days are Hondurans and Nicaraguans.

So are the laborers who scrape salt crystals from the bottom of pools hugging the Pacific coastline, and the construction workers building pricey housing developments on the reddish earth a few miles inland.

"You can't find Salvadorans to do this kind of work anymore," said Jose Acosta, the supervisor at a construction site where almost all of the 35 men toiling under a harsh sun on a recent morning were from Nicaragua.

 

 

We pray for the children who put chocolate fingers on everything, who love to be tickled, who stomp in puddles and ruin new pants, who eat candy before supper and who can never find their shoes in the morning.

And we also pray for those who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire, who have never bound down the street in a new pair of shoes, who never played "one potato, two potatoes," and who are born in places that we would not be caught dead in and they will be.

We pray for the children who give us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions, who sleeps with their dog and who bury their goldfish, who hug us so tightly and who forget their lunch money, who squeeze toothpaste all over the sink, who watch their fathers shave, and who slurp their soup.

And we pray for those who will never get dessert, who have no favorite blanket to drag around behind them, who watch their fathers suffer, who cannot find any bread to steal, who do not have any rooms to clean up, whose pictures are on milk cartons instead of on dressers, and whose monsters are real.

We pray for the children who spend all their allowance by Tuesday, who pick at their food, who love ghost stories, who shove their dirty clothes under the bed and never rinse the bathtub, who love visits from the Tooth Fairy, even after they find out who it really is, who do not like to be kissed in front of the school bus, and who squirm during services.

And we also pray for those children whose nightmares occur in the daytime, who will eat anything, who have never seen a dentist, who are not spoiled by anyone, who go to bed hungry and wake up hungry, who live and move and have no address.

We pray for those children who like to be carried and for those children who have to be carried. for those who give up and for those who never give up, for those who will grab the hand of anyone kind enough to offer it and for those who find no hand to grab.

For all these children, we pray today, for they are all so precious.

Ina J. Hughs

(From Prensa Latina [Cuba])  Salvadoran Public Health Minister Guillermo Maza asserted Thursday that the increased number of dengue fever cases in that Central American country threatens to unleash an epidemic.

Maza said 9 more people entered the national hospitals Wednesday night with symptoms of classic and hemorrhagic dengue.

Thus far in 2006, El Salvador authorities have recognized 1,282 cases of classic and 36 of hemorrhagic dengue fever in the country. In the same period of 2005, 815 and 32 cases were reported respectively.

In 2000, El Salvador experienced a dengue fever epidemic, costing the lives of 35 children.

 

From The Washington Post.  For the complete story go to http://blog.washingtonpost.com/worldopinionroundup/2006/05/el_salvador_ducks_us_immigrati.html

Mexico is the biggest factor in the U.S. debate, with more than 26 million people of Mexican descent living here. But Mexico is not as dependent on its expatriate workers as El Salvador. More than two million Salvadorans - a quarter of the country's population - live in the United States. The vast majority have come in the past twenty five years and the majority are here illegally. They send $2.5 billion a year in remittances (remesas) to relatives back home, according to the State Department about 17 percent of the country's total gross national product. El Salvador is so dependent on American money that it abolished its own currency in 2000 and made the U.S. dollar the only legal tender...  Yet in El Salvador itself, U.S. immigration reform is rarely talked about...

The country's leading newspapers, which range from right-wing to ultra right-wing in the editorial outlook, support [Salvadoran President Tony] Saca's efforts to position El Salvador as the most loyal supporter of the Bush administration in the hemisphere. El Salvador was the first country to approve the U.S.-backed Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) and it is the only Latin American country with troops in Iraq...

[Salvadoran talk show host Narciso] Castillo sees a double standard behind the lack of debate. "On the one side, the government want the immigrants to send the remesas. The economy couldn't survive without them. On the other hand, it doesn't want to do anything publicly to protect the status of those immigrants. The policy is all based on confidence that things will turn out well for Salvadorans because of good relations with Bush."