Election ads anger El Salvador’s ombudsman

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Financial Times

Election ads anger El Salvador’s ombudsman

By Adam Thomson in San Salvador

Published: March 14 2009 01:42 | Last updated: March 14 2009 01:42

El Salvador’s human rights ombudsman has launched a stinging attack on the country’s chief electoral authority for failing to enforce the law, just hours before the tiny violence-ravaged nation prepares to vote for a new president.

In an interview with the FT this week, Oscar Humberto Luna, El Salvador’s attorney-general for human rights, said that the electoral tribunal should have put a stop “from the very start” to negative advertising campaigns that have broken just about every rule in the book. “There has been a series of adverts, television adverts, damaging the image and the dignity of the candidates,” said Mr Luna. “The law states that these adverts should be suspended but the tribunal has not acted.”

Mr Luna said that while both the leftwing FMLN party and the incumbent rightwing Arena party are guilty of breaking the electoral laws, “one party has been more adversely affected … the leftwing party”.

~snip~
An FMLN victory would also spell the end of Central America’s only remaining rightwing government – one that has become an important US ally in the region in recent years and that even sent troops to support the US invasion of Iraq.

In an effort to prevent that prospect from happening, El Salvador’s Arena party, which has held office for the past two decades, recently launched a media campaign associating Mr Funes with Hugo Chávez, the radical Venezuelan president.


Read more: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/240db538-0fd8-11de-a8ae-0000779fd2ac.html?nclick_check=1

[rabs]

1. ARENA is doing all it can to steal the election

Gleaned from the El Salvador media today:

Two supporters (young brothers) were shot to death yesterday by youths wearing ARENA colors.
Busloads of Nicaraguans, Hondurans and Guatemalans were video-taped getting voter ID cards in border towns. FMLN has denounced this and blamed ARENA.
Two planes dropped ARENA leaflets yesterday over several towns. The leaflets said FMLN candidate Funes was planning to move into a $1 million mansion if elected. All campaigning, rallies etc. have been banned since Wednesday so that was a violation of Salvadoran law.
The planes' tail numbers are registered to ARENA supporters.
FMLN said some voters had been detected with two ID numbers on the same photo card. The ARENA head of the electoral council said they were probably identical twins.
A pro-Funes newspaper reminded voters that Hugo Chavez of Venezuela was not running for president. ARENA has been linking Funes to Chavez, Fidel Castro and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua.
ARENA has been saying that remittances from Salvadorans in the United States will be banned if FMLN wins the vote.
ARENA's tactics are aimed to arouse the fear factor that party has used in past elections.
About 850 foreign observers are in the country, including from Israel, the OAS and the EU. Doubtful that the Europeans and others will be able to detect a Salvadoran from someone from neighboring countries.

Funes had a sizable lead (about 10 points) a month ago, but media that supports ARENA has been saying for several days that it is now a statistical tie.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Thanks so much for checking what is available from the El Salvador media, rabs.

It's amazing how LITTLE actual information makes it to us, isn't it?

You may have seen that obnoxious thread this week with someone attempting to claim Hugo Chavez is living it up in Venezuela because he heard he lives at the "Presidential Palace."

Poor guy had to be informed by someone who had seen it that the "Palace" is a SMALLER building than the U.S. White House before he finally faded away with that claptrap.

So the right-wing in El Salvador is attempting to claim Funes hopes to hit the big time and live it up as a President, in an attempt to block his "greed" by keeping him out of office. So damned nasty of them.

You undoubtedly recall with Operation Mongoose cooked up by our own psyops, they dropped tons of leaflets in Cuba with a created image of a very FAT Fidel Castro in a room with a huge table loaded down with fabulous food, partying with sexy women, and a caption under it claiming that Fidel Castro eats lobster while everyone else goes without, or something stupid.

Another one of their stupid stunts, like attempting to slip him a drug which would make his beard fall out.

This trouble the right-wing is creating in El Salvador sounds lethal, like they're REALLY trying to overthrow this election. You are so right, the hundreds of foreign observers couldn't possibly cover a ton of incoming paid bogus voters from surrounding countries. They aren't equiped to do that.

Thanks for the better news, rabs.

[Peace Patriot]

8. Hm, I was wondering about those polls, which the NYT regurgitated the other day,

saying it's now a tie. Funes (the leftist candidate) has been running 10% to 15% points ahead of the fascist for many months. Suddenly, it's a tie? So, the NYT was relying on ARENA polls, it appears, and is possibly helping to write the false narrative for a stolen election (as they did for Bush-Cheney in 2004). I suspected as much. This does not bode well for the outcome, or for a clean election. El Salvador is behind Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia and other Latin American countries, on transparent elections, and is more like Mexico, I fear. The grass roots is active, having recovered from the US-sponsored death squads and horrid oppression of the 1980s, and the interests of the majority are making a comeback with the new rise of the left--but there is still a lot of work to be done on democratic institutions, and on the ARENA party's entrenched, corrupt grip on power.

Paraguay is an interesting comparison--which just this last summer voted for its first leftist president, ever, after 61 years of rightwing rule, including a heinous dictatorship. However, Paraguay's geopolitical situation is different from El Salvador's. Paraguay is land-locked, with leftist neighbors all around, including two big ones, Brazil and Argentina. And Paraguay joined the Venezuela-inspired Bank of the South, and also rescinded its non-extradition law and its law immunizing the US military even before leftist Fernando Lugo (the beloved "bishop of the poor") was elected. The rightwing Colorado Party evidently saw "the handwriting on the wall"--that the left was winning everywhere else, and that it was therefore best for Paraguay to make some accommodations to it--if it wanted to benefit from new left-dominated economic projects. I simply don't know if any ground work was done by civic groups and/or international election monitoring groups prior to Lugo's victory. I did read, though, that what Lugo did was to unite Paraguay's very fractured political parties against the Colorado candidate (rather surprising; some commentators predicted that it couldn't be done). And it may be that, rather than election reform, which accounts for his victory. (If the left just gets its shit together, it will almost always win, even with some election fraud.)

El Salvador has leftist Nicaragua on its border, left-leaning Honduras, and newly progressive Guatemala (a government that is sympathetic to the social justice goals of the Bolivarian Revolution). But has coastal access (the Pacific), and is certainly a bull's eye for the US corpo-fascist strategy of "circling the wagons" in the Caribbean/Central America region against the new left and its left-dominated common market, UNASUR, in South America. It is also a potential launching pad for US aggression against both neighboring and more distant leftist governments.

The corpo/fascists badly, BADLY want to retain this little fascist enclave, even to the point of the Bushwhacks having given a preferential visa policy to El Salvador. The rightwing government (so typical) has neglected local manufacturing and jobs, sold the country out to multinational corporations ("free trade"), relied on imports and shipped 20% of its poor workers to shit jobs in the north.

But most importantly, El Salvador is a key part of the puzzle of this "circling of the wagons" militarily. The US "war on drugs" is increasingly seen as a pariah in Latin America, and a stealth method of US spying and war planning. Ecuador is about to evict the US military from its base in Manta, Ecuador--a vow of the new leftist president that was certainly reinforced by the US/Colombia bombing/raid on Ecuador's territory last year. The new president of Paraguay has said that he wants the US military out of his country. Bolivia threw out the US ambassador and the DEA, for meddling (funding/organizing murderous fascist riots and coup plotters). And Venezuela long ago evicted whatever it could find of the US military, the "war on drugs" and the CIA. This is the trend. So the US military has become increasingly "homeless" in Latin America, which makes this "Forward Operating Location" in El Salvador all the more important...

(Just mentally edit out the stated US military purpose, below, of interdicting the drug trade. Wherever the US military and the DEA go, the drug trade prospers--and also gets more violent. The "war on drugs" is just the excuse for militarizing and oppressing these societies, and using them as launching pads for aggression:

"Comalapa Air Base, El Salvador

"Comalapa is the newest of the four counterdrug Forward Operating Locations (FOL). The withdrawal of US forces from Panama in 1999 led to the development of alternatives to support multi-national counter drug missions. The US Navy and Air Force developed the concept of the Forward Operating Location (FOL) to support deployed forces and aircraft conducting these operations, under the auspices of US Southern Command in Miami, Florida. The FOL provides deployed forces the infrastructure to conduct around the clock operations to include operational and maintenance support, communication capabilities, billeting, and other services as required. As of late 2000 there were four operational FOL sites, with P-3C Maritime Patrol Aircraft deployed to Naval Station Roosevelt Roads primarily utilizing the sites in Manta, Ecuador and Comalapa, El Salvador.

"FOLs are not bases, but staging airfields, owned and operated by the host nation as part of our collective efforts to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the United States. Without these FOLs, the US would be unable to effectively carry out our detection and monitoring mission and would fall well short – 50 percent – of the historical coverage provided from Howard AFB. Coverage in the deep source zone, the area identified as "critical" in the President’s National Drug Control Strategy, would be severely degraded." (MORE)

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/comalapa.htm

--------

(The US military is also trying this new ploy of looking benign and providing aid to civilians...)

"U.S. Military, Salvadoran Veterinarians Provide Care for Livestock

"Posted On: May 28 2008 7:59AM

"Story by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Matthew Jackson

"USS Boxer (LHD 4) Public Affairs

"SONSONATE, El Salvador – A team of U.S. Army and U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) veterinarians, embarked aboard USS Boxer (LHD 4), worked alongside El Salvador Ministry of Agriculture veterinarians to care for animals in El Salvador’s Sonsonate Region, May 23, in support of Continuing Promise (CP) 2008." (MORE)

http://www.southcom.mil/AppsSC/news.php?storyId=1181

[Judi Lynn]

9. Yes, changing the name of launch pads for aggression to "lily pads" as Rumsfeld

chose really gets that job accomplished, doesn't it?

How "beating their swords into plowshares" they became in undertaking helping El Salvadoran vets look after their livestock. My, my. One almost forgets all about the U.S. trained SOA DEATH SQUADS which slaughtered entire villages in El Salvador in El Salvador's recent past.

Take a good look at this list of S.O.A. graduates who took their U.S. taxpayers-funded education back home to share with their countrymen/women:

http://www.derechos.org/soa/elsal-not.html

School of the Americas:
School of Assassins, USA

Countries / Graduates (since 1946)
Argentina / 931
Bolivia / 4,049
Brazil / 355
Chile / 2,405
Colombia / 8,679
Costa Rica / 2,376
Dominican Republic / 2,330
Ecuador / 2,356
El Salvador / 6,776
Guatemala / 1,676
Honduras / 3,691
Nicaragua / 4,693
Panama / 4,235
Paraguay / 1,084
Peru / 3,997
Uruguay / 931
Venezuela / 3,250

When they return to their home countries, graduates of the SOA hold a rather unique and peculiar view of their countrymen. They look upon priests, social workers, journalists, and liberal intellectuals, not as assets to their societies, but as dangerous subversives, working to undermine the system that keeps these soldiers, army officers, and their sponsors in power.

Graduates of the SOA have been among the most repressive tyrants in Latin America, and their actions have been some of the most cruel and violent. In El Salvador, in 1989, a Salvadoran army patrol executed six Jesuit priests as they lay face-down on the ground at Central America University. According to the United Nation's Truth Commission Report on El Salvador in 1993, 19 of the 27 officers who took part in the executions were trained at the SOA.

In 1990, in El Salvador, populist Archbishop Oscar Romero was assassinated. Three-quarters of the Salvadoran officers implicated in the killing were trained at the SOA. Roberto D'Aubuison, the late leader of El Salvador's Death Squad, was implicated in the plot to assassinate Archbishop Romero. He also participated in numerous murders, including a massacre in the village of El Mazote, where more than 900 men, women, and children were killed. He graduated from SOA as well.
The U.N. Truth Commission's statistics reveal the extent of the School's murderous role in El Salvador .

Romero assassination 3 officers cited --- 2 were SOA graduates
Murder of US nuns 5 officers cited --- 3 were SOA graduates
Union leader murders 3 officers cited --- 3 were SOA graduates
El Junquillo massacre 3 officers cited --- 2 were SOA graduates
El Mazote massacre 12 officers cited --- 10 were SOA graduates
Dutch journalist murders 1 officer cited --- he was an SOA graduate
Las Hojas massacre 6 officers cited --- 3 were SOA graduates
San Sebastian massacre 7 officers cited --- 6 were SOA graduates
Jesuit massacre 26 officers cited --- 19 were SOA graduates

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Terrorism/SOA.html

~~~~~~~~~~

Another SOA? Police Academy in El Salvador Worries Critics
Written by Wes Enzinna
Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Source: NACLA Report on the Americas

http://upsidedownworld.org.nyud.net:8090/main/images/stories/March08/sansalvador1_main250big.jpg

emi-secretly established in 2005, a Salvadoran branch of the International Law Enforcement Academy, a U.S.-sponsored global network of police schools, has angered critics and human rights activists, who wonder if it will perpetuate long-standing patterns of police and military abuse in the country. A NACLA investigation sponsored by the Samuel Chavkin Investigative Fund finds that establishing transparency in the academy’s operations—including making public its course materials and the names of its graduates—is the first critical step in ensuring it does not become, or has not already become, a new School of the Americas.

“The legacy of U.S. training of security forces at the School of the Americas and throughout Latin America is one of bloodshed, of torture, of the targeting of civilian populations, of desaparecidos,” wrote SOA Watch founder Roy Bourgeois after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced plans for the ILEA San Salvador at a June 2005 Organization of American States meeting in Miami. “Rice’s recent announcement about plans for the creation of an international law enforcement academy in El Salvador should raise serious concerns for anyone who cares about human rights,” he said.

And as recently as June, a member of the Committee in Solidarity With the People of El Salvador (CISPES) wrote, “The ILEA in El Salvador is functioning like another SOA, under a new name and in a new location.”

Unlike the SOA, the ILEA is run jointly by the Salvadoran Ministry of Government and the U.S. State Department—though virtually all its instructors come from the United States, and most of the school’s expenses are covered by U.S. tax dollars. By the end of 2007, the United States had spent at least $3.6 million on the academy, according to an estimate by ILEA director Hobart Henson. While the school is temporarily housed at the National Academy for Public Security in San Salvador, a permanent $4 million headquarters is under ­construction.

The school joins a slew of other police- and military-training facilities throughout Latin America run by U.S. agencies, among them the FBI, Customs Agency, and DEA, as well as training programs run by private U.S. security companies like DynCorp International. In 1999, the last year for which figures are available, Washington trained between 13,000 and 15,000 Latin American military and police personnel, according to the Center for International Policy.

U.S. and Salvadoran officials should not have been surprised with the opposition to the ILEA and the comparisons to the SOA. Before settling on El Salvador, the United States had hoped to establish an ILEA South in Costa Rica, but failed. “The story of what happened in Costa Rica,” says Guadalupe Erazo of the Popular Social Bloc, a coalition of Salvadoran activists, “is instructive because it shows the undemocratic nature of the ILEA, and the accountability to the public.”

After a brief, aborted attempt to establish the school in Panama , U.S. officials chose Costa Rica to host the academy in 2002. An agreement with the Costa Rican government was signed, making the deal official, and the plan made headlines across the country. The agreement allowed for military topics to be taught and military personnel to participate in the school, and also gave immunity to U.S. officials. When this became public, a broad coalition of Costa Rican citizen, labor, and human rights groups demanded these clauses be removed from the agreement. The Costa Rican government ultimately adopted the public’s demands in its negotiations.

The United States, however, refused to meet these conditions, and as Kathryn Tarker of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs put it, “Washington decided to ‘pick up the marbles and go home’ rather than offer concessions to transparency and anti- military safeguards.”

Hoping to avoid the problems encountered in Costa Rica, the U.S. and Salvadoran governments worked quietly to establish the ILEA in San Salvador. In fact, at the time of Rice’s June 2005 announcement at the OAS—the first time the school had been mentioned publicly—U.S. officials were already planning for classes to begin. Little more than a month after Rice’s announcement, 36 students from Colombia, the Dominican Republic, and El Salvador began a course titled “Organized Crime and Human Rights” at the Comalapa air force base on the outskirts of San Salvador. Yet it wasn’t until almost two months later, on September 20, that then U.S. ambassador H. Douglas Barclay and Salvadoran minister of governance Rene Figueroa signed an agreement officially establishing the school.

In the months prior to September, public debate about the ILEA was scant. Members of the U.S. Congress were not briefed about the academy, nor was the main opposition party in El Salvador, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). But once the news media reported that the two countries had signed an official agreement in September, activists in El Salvador demanded to see the text of the document. Protesting their exclusion, a coalition of Salvadoran activists, including the Sinti Techan Citizens Network, demanded that President Antonio Saca make the agreement public and develop an open debate, consulting “all social sectors of the country before submitting it to the Legislative Assembly.”

This never happened. While FMLN senators denounced the school in the assembly and made a last-ditch effort to prevent the agreement from being ratified, their bile-filled rants, rather than critical arguments, did little to convince anyone. “We cannot support them coming in to deform the minds of our police, prosecutors and judges,” FMLN deputy Salvador Arias later said. Ultimately, the FMLN failed to mobilize the country’s social movements, and much of the public remained in the dark on the details of what was at stake. On November 30, 2005, the National Assembly ratified the ILEA agreement, with 48 out of 88 members voting in favor.

In the end, the United States achieved what it couldn’t in Panama or Costa Rica: The ILEA was official, and the ratified agreement making it so allowed for no mechanism of transparency or civilian oversight, included no agreement excluding military personnel or topics, and left the door open for a later clause that would give U.S. personnel immunity from prosecution.More:
http://upsidedownworld.org/main/content/view/1182/74/

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

RIGHTS-EL SALVADOR: Death Squads Still Operating
By Raúl Gutiérrez

SAN SALVADOR, Sep 4 (IPS) - Recent arrests of police officers in El Salvador accused of committing extrajudicial executions have encouraged human rights activists and experts who have long reported the continued existence of death squads in this Central American country.

For years, human rights organisations and experts have said the death squads that operated during the counterinsurgency war in the 1980s never disappeared, but merely became groups of paid killers that still operate with impunity, and are hired to "settle scores, carry out vengeance killings, eliminate a businessman’s competitor, carry out ‘social cleansing’ or work for organised crime."

Lawyer Jaime Martínez, with the Institute of Comparative Studies in Criminal and Social Science (INECIP), told IPS that the groups "are the visible face of organised crime, and do their dirty work."

There are strong indications that "criminal groups are embedded" in the National Civilian Police (PNC), said Martínez.

He lamented that the authorities have not made this a key concern, and instead dismiss such reports by arguing that the problem is just a few bad officers who must be weeded out.

"We cannot continue to believe in the ‘few bad apples’ theory," said the expert, who conducted research on citizen security and death squads when he headed the Foundation for Studies on the Application of Rights (FESPAD) Criminal Studies Centre for 13 years.

Police Sergeant Nelson Arriaza and officer Roberto Carlos Chévez were arrested Jul. 28, along with the now fugitive Rember Martínez, and accused of murdering campesino (small farmer) Amado García in the town of Nueva Esparta in the northeastern department (province) of Morazán.

Four other police officers were arrested Aug. 27 in the eastern department of San Miguel in connection with the group headed by Arriaza, and were charged with belonging to a death squad.

Another police officer and a civilian are also facing arrest for alleged ties to the same group.

PNC chiefs have acknowledged the problem, which they downplay, however, as "isolated incidents."

But the prosecutor’s office has not ruled out an investigation into possible connections between Arriaza and other members of the PNC, as well as other killings in San Miguel, where the police sergeant was posted.

Another indication of the existence of death squads was the distribution of flyers over the past two weeks in the town of Chalchuapa, 80 km from San Salvador, signed simply with the initials "E.L." The leaflets declare a "curfew" and urge local residents and the members of the PNC themselves to stay inside at night.

"For your own good, we advise you not to be on the streets after 10:00 PM, because we are carrying out a cleansing campaign," says the flyer.

More:
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=39143

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Ethical Spectacle, May 1995, http://www.spectacle.org

Senator Helms and Murder
In the U.S. Senate today is a man, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, who should be called upon to answer the following question: "Senator, is murder an acceptable tactic in foreign policy?"

In a December 7, 1994 article profiling the Senator, the New York Times said:

For Mr. Helms, the devil lived down in Latin America during the 1980's. The Senator and his staff aimed to fight him. They became a crucible of American support for the far right wing: politicians linked to death squads in El Salvador; the Guatemalan military, which killed thousands of people suspected of ties to the left; Honduran military intelligence; the Argentine junta; and other violently authoritarian governments of the era.

According to the article, Senator Helms aided Roberto D'Aubuisson and his ARENA party, a Salvadorean politician in command of the death squads, by disclosing a secret CIA plan to support Jose Napoleon Duarte, D'Aubuisson's centrist opposition in an election. As a result, enraged D'Aubuisson supporters plotted to kill U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering. Mr. Helms sent a letter to these partisans that said:

Ambassador Pickering has been the leader of the death squads against democracy. Mr. Pickering has used his diplomatic capacity to strangle liberty during the night.

Senator Helms was censured by the Senate for conducting his own foreign policy. Luckily, Ambassador Pickering escaped murder.

If you don't remember, El Salvador is the country where death squads gunned down the Archbishop, raped and murdered three American nuns and a lay worker, and shot two visiting U.S. labor officials during the '80's; more recently, several priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were gunned down in their home. These are only the crimes that garnered international attention; they took place against a background of the constant torture and murder of anyone seen opposing the regime, including Catholic priests and human rights advocates. My source for the following is Phillip Berryman, Stubborn Hope: Religion, Politics and Revolution in Central America(New Press, 1994):

One priest reported seeing D'Aubuisson tell a rally that after winning they would have to "take care of this archbishop, these Jesuits, these other priests and especially these foreigners who are ruining the minds of our children. And if the gringos want to help the communists and cut military aid, we didn't need military aid in 1932. If we had to kill 30,000.....in 1932, we'll kill 250,000 today."

More:
http://www.spectacle.org/595/helms.html

~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The story must be remembered forever, that after an S.O.A. sharpshooter assassinated Archbishop Romero as he conducted mass, assassins positioned themselves around the cathedral, and opened fire on the mourners, killing 40 of them and injuring 450. Here's a photo of the scene:

http://www.jamd.com/image/g/2665377

Not only did the right-wing government not want the Archbishop to continue speaking and working on behalf of the poor, they didn't want the people of El Salvador to attend his funeral and leave peacefully without taking a deadly message home with them, to intimidate them to deeper levels of complete submission.

Damed sad.

http://followingjesus.org.nyud.net:8090/images/section_graphics/romero.jpgClosing remarks of his last sermon to the people of El Salvador:

~snip~
I would like to make a special appeal to the men of the army, and specifically to the ranks of the National Guard, the police and the military. Brothers, you come from our own people. You are killing your own brother peasants when any human order to kill must be subordinate to the law of God which says, "Thou shalt not kill." No soldier is obliged to obey an order contrary to the law of God. No one has to obey an immoral law. It is high time you recovered your consciences and obeyed your consciences rather than a sinful order. The church, the defender of the rights of God, of the law of God, of human dignity, of the person, cannot remain silent before such an abomination. We want the government to face the fact that reforms are valueless if they are to be carried out at the cost of so much blood. In the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose cries rise to heaven more loudly each day, I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.

The church preaches your liberation just as we have studied it in just as we have studied it in the holy Bible today. It is a liberation that has, above all else, respect for the dignity of the person, hope for humanity's common good, and the transcendence that looks before all to God and only from God derives its hope and its strength.

http://www.haverford.edu/relg/faculty/amcguire/romero.html

[Peace Patriot]

10. Judi, thank you for your amazing research!

I've read that last sermon of Archbishop Romero before, and it brought tears to my eyes then, as it does now. To think that these US-trained assassins could murder him on the altar after such a heartfelt appeal to their humanity. It is a testimony to the evil of the School of the Americas' training, and to the dreadful evil and callousness that gripped our own secret government and military, even before the Reaganites came to power (later that year, 1980), and escalated the horrors perpetrated against Latin Americans into the genocidal murder of 200,000 Mayans villagers in Guatemala.

Just stumbled over this, looking for the dates of the massacres in Guatemala:

Discovering Dominga - a documentary

(Survivor of 1982 Guatemala Massacre Takes Astonishing Journey Home)


On March 13, 1982, Denese Becker was a nine-year-old Maya girl named Dominga living in the Maya highlands, when the Guatemalan army entered the village of Rio Negro. By the time the soldiers left, hundreds of people, including 70 women and 107 children, had been massacred and dumped in a mass grave. They became part of the estimated 4,000 to 5,000 men, women and children killed in the Rio Negro area by military forces from 1980 to 1983. The Rio Negro villagers had been marked as “insurgents” for resisting their forced removal to make way for a World Bank-funded dam. Dominga was one of the unaccountably “lucky” survivors of the massacre at Rio Negro.

Placed in an orphanage, she was adopted two years later by a Baptist minister and his wife from Iowa. Dominga became Denese. Adjusting to her new life in America, she tried to bury the trauma of the massacre and the unspeakable memories so foreign to her Midwestern neighbors. She graduated high school, happily married Iowa native Blane Becker, had children, and became a manicurist.

But Denese never completely forgot her childhood as Dominga, and was haunted by memories of her parents’ murder. When she asked one of her adoptive cousins for help to research her past, she discovered she still had family in Guatemala. She decided to return to find them. In Discovering Dominga, Denese’s journey to her homeland becomes a heartbreaking exposé of the massacre at Rio Negro. In some of the film’s most moving sequences, she and her remaining Maya relatives embrace and touch, as if to recapture the years apart and celebrate that “Dominga” is alive. They share bittersweet memories of family and village life, and then the story of the killings comes pouring out. Inexorably, Denese is drawn into the ongoing struggle of the surviving Rio Negro community to find justice.
(MORE)

Documentary was aired on P.O.V. in 2003. Produced and directed by Patricia Flynn, with co-producer Mary Jo McConahay, who spent several years in Guatemala and wrote Denese Becker’s story.

http://www.laprensa-sandiego.org/archieve/july03-03/dominga.htm

------------------

Prayers and good thoughts today for the El Salvadoran survivors of my government's horrible oppression, in their effort to elect a just and honest and representative government, for the first time, ever, I believe--this weekend in El Salvador. May Archbishop Romero's peaceful spirit shower blessings upon El Salvador and all of Latin America. May his martyrdom be redeemed, as he would have wished, by a good, social justice government coming to power, at long last.

[Judi Lynn]

11. Oh, my gosh. Here's the website to the program on PBS.

There's a trailer on the right side, right below the picture and caption, across from "Check for rebroadcasts."

This is the link for the fast connection:
http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2003/discoveringdominga/player/discoveringdominga_220.html

Here's the website. The little trailer is 4 minutes 44 seconds. You'll want to see it.
http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2003/discoveringdominga/

I'll be watching tv listings on P.O.V. to see this when it comes around again, and undoubtedly they'll run it. They would be insane to NOT run it.

Thank you for this window into a purely evil political situation which should NEVER have happened. NEVER, no matter WHAT huge country wanted them to kill off all the people who didn't want to give up their homes so the World Bank dam could flood the area.

[Judi Lynn]

3. In El Salvador, Cautious Optimism On What a Progressive Win Would Mean for U.S. Relations

In El Salvador, Cautious Optimism On What a Progressive Win Would Mean for U.S. Relations
By Roberto Lovato, New America Media
Posted on March 14, 2009, Printed on March 14, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/131552/

SAN SALVADOR -- El Salvador’s election on March 15 is an occasion for Salvadorans to consider future relations with the United States and the new Obama Administration. How the new president and his advisers respond to these elections could be an early measure of U.S.-Latin American relations. And it may also be an opportunity for Obama to begin fulfilling his campaign promise to “lead the hemisphere into the 21st Century.”

As much as he appreciates the change of U.S. administrations, philosophy student Carlos Ramirez, 24, who was sitting beneath a tree near the central plaza of his school, the University of El Salvador in San Salvador, expressed concern that the administration has only made a brief statement of neutrality on the widely-watched elections here. Ramirez and others, including more than 33 U.S. congressmembers who sent Obama a dear-colleague letter about the Salvadoran elections, fear a repeat of 2004. Then, Bush Administration officials intervened in the Salvadoran elections, suggesting that a victory by the opposition party would endanger the legal status of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States and would prohibit remittances they send home.

“I want Obama to understand that there are some students here -- a minority, I would say -- who still have the ‘80’s attitude of permanent confrontation with the United States that we see in campus protests against the Iraq war, CAFTA and other policies,” said Ramirez. “But most of us are open to re-thinking the relationship with the United States. We all recognize that all of us, including the United States, are in a profound crisis and extremely interdependent, as you can see in issues like immigration, trade and security. We’re open and now it’s up to Obama to define his position, and the elections are a good place to start.”

More:
http://www.alternet.org/audits/131552/in_el_salvador%2C_cautious_optimism_on_what_a_progressive_win_would_mean_for_u.s._relations/

Ramirez’ open-but-cautious attitude is the product of both political maturity and the Bush era policies toward Latin America that bred alienation from the United States. Viewed from this perspective, Sunday's elections have significance beyond the tiny country of 7 million. How the Obama Administration deals with El Salvador’s hotly contested elections and their aftermath will communicate much about what this country and Latin America can expect from him.

[Judi Lynn]

4. Christian Science Monitor: Evangelicals key to El Salvador elections

Evangelicals key to El Salvador elections
The group, which has begun to shift to the left, could determine the outcome of Sunday's presidential election.
By Sara Miller Llana | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 13, 2009 edition

San Salvador - When Carlos Rivas became an evangelical pastor 10 years ago, he attempted to create a television show uncovering corruption within El Salvador's conservative ruling party. But he was quickly informed that his church prohibited open criticism of the government.

So he founded the Tabernáculo de Avivamiento Internacional (TAI), a church in the impoverished outskirts of San Salvador. And today, his blogs, editorials, and weekly television programs make an art of denouncing injustice and inequality. He has, in other words, adopted the lexicon of the left.

"Pastors once taught us that poverty was natural," Pastor Rivas says. "But it's because of bad distribution of resources."

Evangelicals in El Salvador, who are mostly Pentecostals, have long been a coveted group among politicians: they make up one-third of the population. But most have been apolitical, and those who did engage politically tended to align with the conservative Nationalist Republican Alliance (Arena) party.

Now that is starting to change. In Sunday's presidential election, according to a University of Central America (UCA) poll, 42 percent of Evangelicals say they favor the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), the leftist party that grew out of a guerilla movement that battled the military in a 12-year civil war, while 31 percent favor Arena. It is a significant shift from 2004, when 44 percent of Evangelicals voted for Arena and only 28.6 percent for the FMLN.

More:
http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0314/p07s01-woam.html

[David__77]

6. There could be a whole study of Pentacostalism in Latin America.

A whole book or series of books. I would read it.

[rabs]

15. Lots of material on Pentecostal movement in Latam

Here is one:

http://pewforum.org/surveys/pentecostal/latinamerica/

Much more available: Google: Latin America Pentacostalism.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Salvadoran Labour Ministry Asked to Put a Stop to Union Busting at US-owned plant

March 13 2009

Salvadoran Labour Ministry Asked to Put a Stop to Union Busting at US-owned plant

El Salvador’s Labour Minister José Roberto Espinal Escobar has been asked to intervene to prevent the US multinational Hanesbrands from illegally wiping out union representation at its Inversiones Bonaventure plant outside San Salvador.

The Brussels-based International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF) has warned the government that the actions of companies like Inversiones Bonaventure are besmirching the image of El Salvador’s garment industry in what are already very difficult times.

Says ITGLWF General Secretary Neil Kearney: “On February 6 the company eliminated its night shift and laid off 164 workers, the majority of whom were members and leaders of the branch of the Sindicato de Trabajadores de las Industrias Textiles (STIT).

“The restructuring, which resulted in the dismissal of every trade union leader and virtually the entire membership, was the culmination of months’ of anti-union discrimination on the part of the company.

“The company initially dismissed the union leaders, but when they protested at the illegality of the decision management then changed tack and offered them two years’ severance on condition they sign an agreement saying they had resigned voluntarily and without any pressure from the company.

“The company used scare tactics to push them into accepting the deal, falsely claiming that their union credentials were not in proper order but saying the company was prepared to overlook this fact if the dismissed leaders agreed to ‘resign’.

More:
http://www.itglwf.org/DisplayDocument.aspx?idarticle=15713&langue=2

[Lost in CT]

7. On a glibber note...

I would think any proper ombudsman would object to "tiny violence-ravaged nation" ... that seems all sorts of harsh...

[EFerrari]

12. Should anyone need a clear example of the war on democracy in Latin America

that results in instability there and undocumented immigration here, the election tomorrow in El Salvador is one.

The electorate is threatened from the floor of the House by Republicans with deportation of legal residents, with pulling the money they send home, with being put on terrorist watch lists. Those threats go directly to the headlines in El Salvador.

snip

Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) said, “Should the pro-terrorist FMLN party replace the current government in El Salvador, the United States, in the interests of national security, would be required to reevaluate our policy toward El Salvador, including cash remittance and immigration policies to compensate for the fact there will no longer be a reliable counterpart in the Salvadoran government.”



Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN) stated, “Those monies that are coming from here to there I am confident will be cut, and I hope the people of El Salvador are aware of that because it will have a tremendous impact on individuals and their economy.” Indeed, these threats carry considerable weight for Salvadoran voters, as 25% of the Salvadoran population lives in the U.S., and 20% of the nation's economy consists of remittances from those family members.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x12677

We don't even know how much of our tax money was sent down there to keep the corporate collaborating oligarchy in power to benefit Wall Street and to stamp out democracy in El Salvador. We'll find out, though, because the truth always comes out.

Our owners are trying desperately to prop up ARENA, a blood bathed party born of Reagan's dirty wars in Central America.

It's right out there for anyone who wants to see it. This is how Latin America is kept off balance. This is why people have to come north. It's not rocket science. The political elite here use our money to prop up the political elite there and workers here and there pay for it.

[Judi Lynn]

13. Republicans love to claim they support democracy, ONLY when it looks as if a fascist

will win. What that condition doesn't apply, out come the threats, and worse!

Thank you for your reference to Trent Franks. Also this pathetic drool, Dan Burton.



Rep. Trent Franks, Dan Burton.

Could a man get any dumber than these clowns?

http://www.deborahlyonsportraits.com.nyud.net:8090/gallery/Men/images/DanBurton.jpg

Dan Burton's PORTRAIT, for ####'s sake. Who would EVER have recognized him?

[EFerrari]

14. The bottom line is, the right wing here is trying to fix the election in El Salvador

to benefit their cronies here and there. It's all in the public view.

If people were unclear on how this works, this is the scene to follow.

[AlphaCentauri]

16. Classical RW modus operandi

sabotage the economies of the countries that don't follow their RW leaders.

[EFerrari]

18. You bet! n/t

[Peace Patriot]

17. I'll sure be glad when we get rid of Dieibold & brethren, and these ugly lowlifes

go back to being Hoover vacuum cleaner salesmen.