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Monday, May 19, 2008
Totally Awesome
From Mike Angel and UCSD and the Episcopal Church in San Diego:
Sunday, May 18, 2008
Remittances hit record of $1.25B
(Associated Press) Salvadoran migrants in the U.S. and elsewhere are sending home record
amounts of money, while remittances to other countries taper off.
El Salvador's Central Reserve Bank reported Friday that it has received a record $1.25 billion in the first
four months of 2008. The previous record was set last year during the same time period -- $1.17 billion.
Mexican remittances have fallen 2.9 percent this year due to the U.S. economic downturn and crackdown on immigration.
But El Salvador's central bank said many of the 2.5 million Salvadorans living in the U.S. haven't been hit
as hard by job cuts and have permission to work legally granted after earthquakes in their homeland in 2001.
[Note that total exports from El Salvador are less than $4.0B. The 'export' of Salvadoran labor is a
very large contributor to the economy.]
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Presidential candidate walks line between right and left
(From The Guardian)
At a raucous rally in Santa Tecla, El Salvador, the banner hanging behind journalist-turned-presidential candidate
Mauricio Funes explained the heart of his campaign: Cambio. Change.
Employing a buzzword from this year's US election, the leftwing Funes has become a political phenomenon by
promising a new direction for one of the staunchest American allies in the region, a country that adopted the dollar as its
currency and is the only Latin American nation to still have troops in Iraq.
The former television host has tried to deftly manage a growing challenge in the politically polarised region
- vowing to remain friendly with both the US and leftist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez while implementing the same formula
of government-funded social programs backed by Chavez and his leftist allies.
But an equally daunting challenge for Funes, arguably El Salvador's most respected journalist, is his effort
to shake up his own party, the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front.
The party began as a 1980s guerrilla movement and evolved into the country's second-strongest political force
but has failed to win the presidency with more traditional leftist candidates.
Funes wants to remake the FMLN into a pragmatic party that, if victorious, would join El Salvador with Guatemala
and Nicaragua as former Cold War-era battlegrounds where voters are trying leftist leaders for the first time since their
conflicts ended.
Suchitoto 14 assassinated
(From WW4 Report) On Friday May 2, Hector Antonio Ventura was assassinated in the community of Valle Verde,
Suchitoto. Ventura was the youngest of the 14 political prisoners captured in Suchitoto on July 2, 2007. According to preliminary
reports, Ventura was stabbed to death.
Ventura was killed days after having agreed to speak at the Day Against Impunity, an event planned to take
place this coming July 2 in Suchitoto, on the anniversary of last years capture of the Suchitoto 14 by police.
Yesterday in a press conference, Salvadoran legal and community organizations demanded that the Attorney General
and National Civilian Police begin an extensive investigation of the case, one that investigates not only the assailants but
also the intellectual authors of the assassination.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Gangs Are ‘Perfect Scapegoats’, Say Experts
For years, the authorities have blamed the country’s high levels of crime on youth gangs, which have been
the main targets of law enforcement efforts.
Drug trafficking and organised crime were hardly mentioned until last
year, when the "maras" (gangs) were accused of being "mutant monsters" that had transformed themselves into branches of these
types of criminal activity.
The police estimate that there are between 10,000 and 13,500 members of the two gangs -- which are sworn
enemies -- in El Salvador, and between 60,000 and 120,000 in the region. Some researchers regard the larger figure as an exaggeration.
Rafael Jordán joined Mara 18 when he was 15. He does not deny that the maras commit "crimes in order to
finance themselves" .... But he denies that they form "part of those organised crime groups." Jordán is now the coordinator
of the human rights unit of Homies Unidos, a non-governmental organisation which helps former gang members.
The Institute of Legal Medicine (IML) reports that only 12 percent of the murders committed in 2005
and 2006 can be attributed to the gangs and 18 percent to common criminals, while 67 percent remain unsolved, with motives
unknown.
"It’s undeniable that the gangs are an important factor in aggravating violence," but the authorities have
made them their "perfect scapegoats" by identifying them as the main culprits and overlooking the activities of organised
crime and drug traffickers, said Jeannette Aguilar, the head of the Central American University’s Institute of Public Opinion
(IUDOP-UCA), who has conducted several regional research projects on the maras.
"Countries in the region have a preeminently
authoritarian vision" of how to combat the gangs, especially the northern triangle comprising El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala,
she said.
Their assumption that "the gangs are a transnational form of organised crime, and that therefore the fight
against them must be regionalised" becomes a "simplistic vision of the phenomenon, used to criminalise poor young people and
their relatives and friends, and to consolidate police states," said Aguilar.
Thu, May 1, 2008 | link
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