El Salvador: Turning ‘communists’ into ‘terrorists’

Back in the ’80s, when the U.S. armed and funded the Salvadoran military to fight a proxy war against communism, delegations of visiting Americans to that country’s embassy were commonplace.

Appalled at the latest round of human rights abuses perpetrated by the army we bankrolled, these groups would petition the ambassador to help curb the repression. Predictably, diplomatic staff would note sometimes with a straight face, sometimes a coy smile, that there was really little they could do, being guests in a country whose sovereignty they were obliged to respect.

Client states often dance to a parody of the ideological tune played by their benefactors, even after the patrons have switched songs. The Salvadoran ruling ARENA party always featured a far more virulent, if odd, strain of anti-communism even than our own, crusading against Godless rebels by killing devout Catholic peasants in droves. To this day at ARENA party convocations, leaders still belt out their party anthem’s lyrics: “El Salvador will be the tomb where the Reds are buried.”

Twenty five years later, Latin America is in revolt against the trade policies that have torpedoed their economies. In the U.S. as well, the gleaming promise of NAFTA, then CAFTA, is now shadowed by a more sober assessment of who wins and who loses. But then, there is El Salvador, still fancying itself the free-trade showcase of the Americas.

Devoted economic protectorate that it is, the country’s capital city boasts scores of U.S. fast food chains selling to rural in-migrants who can no longer afford to grow their own food. Banks flush from surcharges on $2 billion annually of emigrants’ remittances tower above the underbrush of desperate street vendors in the burgeoning “informal economy.” The once infamous “fourteen families,” which owned the country in the ’80s, have now shrunk to six. In a newly dollarized economy, Salvadoran citizens puzzle over paper money featuring U.S. presidents, minted in a language they don’t speak.

Enter the era of the War on Terror. Six years after the twin towers fell, our own country is finally waking up to what the rest of the world has been viewing with dismay: 9/11 hijacked by a cynical administration and used as a pretext for human rights abuse, civil liberties violations, and criminalization of dissent, not to mention a disastrous and tragic war.

But as in the past, even as we begin to regain our senses, down in the colonies they’re just getting started. To cement his country’s “special relationship” with the United States, Salvadoran President Tony Saca enlisted his nation to become the only one in the hemisphere to join the coalition of the willing, sending Latino soldiers to fight Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq.

Buoyed by personal kudos from “my good friend George Bush” and rewarded with nearly half a billion dollars in U.S. development aid, Saca and his party have now gone to work fighting “terror” in their own back yard. Sensing the ideological atmosphere was right, the ARENA government turned its attention to a pesky and growing social movement opposed to health care and water privatization and to plans by foreign trans-national companies for strip-mining rural communities.

In October 2006, the right-wing government approved Decree 108, the Special Law Against Acts of Terrorism. The law rewrites several articles of the Salvadoran penal code, complete with elastic language suitable for subjective interpretation by police and judges. The decree annuls basic tenets of due process and creates new categories of felonies for actions previously protected as freedom of expression.

Last month, the government launched its new legal instrument in an attempt to decapitate the social movement, starting with the Association of Rural Communities for the Development of El Salvador (CRIPDES), a leading advocacy organization. Riot police responded to a demonstration against water privatization by arresting, then imprisoning 13 people on charges of “Acts of Terrorism,” punishable by up to 60 years in prison.

The group includes CRIPDES’ president and vice president as well as a journalist, none of whom were at the scene. For nearly a month the group was held in “preventative detention” under squalid conditions, while prosecutors readied their case to be presented before an extra-judicial special tribunal convened for the occasion.

For the first time since the historic signing of the 1992 peace accords, El Salvador is taking political prisoners, now depicted as terrorists rather than as Communists. This shot across the bow, deploying anti-terrorism statutes to eliminate any space for political expression, could well signal a rapid deterioration of social stability and a return to the bad old days in El Salvador.

So, back to the embassy went a concerned delegation to petition our own government to constructively intervene. Once again, the U.S. government disavows any responsibility, denies any problem and disclaims any leverage.

Fact: $461 million in State Department development aid through the Millennium Challenge Account recently lavished on El Salvador is explicitly conditioned on compliance with human rights criteria. Four of the six salient benchmarks are “rule of law,” “political rights,” “civil liberties” and “voice and accountability.”

There’s zero doubt that our government can do something to stop in its tracks the Salvadoran government’s copycat anti-terror campaign gone bad, which the Bush administration winks at and U.S. taxpayers now subsidize. But will it?

Dennis Chinoy is a member of the U.S.-El Salvador Sister Cities Network, which has linked communities in the U.S. with communities in El Salvador since the 1980s.