Some 400 protesters beat on pots and pans and blew whistles outside the Central Reserve Bank of El Salvador to protest the rise in prices of staple food items.
"I’m desperate, we can't take any more," Guadalupe López, who is raising four children on her own, told IPS. "Besides, we don't have jobs that pay us enough to support our children, to feed them and pay for their education."
Francisco Marroquín, 26, said the government should establish price controls and raise the minimum wage, "so that people can survive." Participants in Wednesday’s pots and pans protest distributed leaflets demanding government action to guarantee "food sovereignty and security."
A demonstration of this kind has not been seen in the Salvadoran capital since the 1980s, when rightwing women’s groups protested against the Christian Democratic government of then president Napoleón Duarte (1984-1989).
El Salvador’s Consumer Defence Centre (CDC) said that between January 2007 and January 2008, the retail price of beans has risen 68 percent, in addition to price increases for rice (56.2 percent) and maize (37.5 percent) -- all basic staples in the diets of poor Salvadoran households.
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